Maker
Zivarna Murphy The Maker
12th September 2026 - 31st October 2026
Dr Zivarna Murphy is an artist and researcher working intuitively across a range of materials and processes including clay, ceramic, sculptural weaving, printmaking and writing. She studied Anthropology and holds a PhD in Human Sciences.
She is interested in the human experience and combines emergent themes from her research around the social aspects of body and organ donation, namely loss, grief and transformation, with an auto-ethnographic approach exploring her own mixed-ethnicity identity and experiences of the world. She explores these themes through material metaphors, sensorial experiences, and parallels within the landscape which surrounds her. For example, on visits to her local East Yorkshire coastline, she observes the erosion and loss of this landscape body as a metaphor for human loss.
Through hand-formed tactile vessels from stoneware and porcelain, layered with eroded boulder clay and impressed shells, rocks and fossils, all gathered from this coastline, she approaches making as a process of discovery. The forms draw upon structures she sees in her local landscape such as fossilised shell bodies, ebbing cliffs and sea formed rocks. She is interested in firing clay to ceramic as a transformative process and the becoming of the vessel body.
Alternative worldbuilding is important within Zivarna’s practice and the materials she uses imbue her work with a strong sense of place and connection.
