Grace Murphy

At the heart of my artistic practice, stands my understanding of individual experience and family; chosen and blood related. Spanning the mediums of moving image, photography, interview and installation, I explore the complexity of individual experience in relation to self, community, place and memory.

Chosen Family, a term that defines queer kinship and community, is an ongoing project that explores the intricacies and richness of the queer experience. This installation uses a Kodak Ektapro and a digital projector to unify my grandparents’ and father’s slides from the 1960s-1980s, with my current film photographs. The medium of photography unifies all three generations as a means to document and understand our positions in the world. All of us in our early twenties; my grandparents married with their three children; my dad, helping his parents build their family house with his mates, and me, discovering the joy and acceptance as the first openly queer person in the family. This work is a self-portrait, an archive of the generations who have come before me and their world, in song with the present understanding of my queerness, my community and myself.