COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES 11 Deirdre Murphy (below) works with mixed media on the Lehigh campus. Nest Alchemy selects (below), Invisible Currents (above). At the time, Murphy didn’t realize how instrumental those visits to the local museum—as well as her father’s lab—would be to her work as a painter, but she can see it clearly in hindsight. “I embrace abstraction in a way that I don’t think a representational painter would,” Murphy says. “I grew up looking in the microscope; my dad always had beautiful photos of blood cells and sickle cell anemia—all the things that can go wrong but look really beautiful even though they’re diabolical.” Murphy’s past decade of exploring natural patterns and alternative perspectives in the avian world began when she completed a residency at the Raptor Center at Hawk Mountain in Kempton, Pa., followed by one at Powdermill Nature Reserve, which is part of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pa. Those experiences resulted in her two series of paintings called Murmurations and Winds of Change. The Raptor Center was just finishing a 15-year climate change study, so researchers were able to share their data with Murphy, who then incorporated the details into her paintings as compositional elements. “That’s when it all started to make sense— that’s what I was seeing in the lab as a little girl,” Murphy says. “And now, I’m able to bring these elements of abstract shape, line and form into the work to make paintings I’ve never seen before, and that challenged me as a maker.” exploring the intersecting topics of avian migratory patterns, the effects of climate change and molecular biology in her work. These interests have led Murphy to numerous fruitful collaborations with scientists at esteemed institutions such as The University of Pennsylvania, Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Drexel University’s Academy of Natural Science and Integral Molecular Laboratory in Philadelphia. A foundation in art and science Murphy, who was born in New York City and raised in France, England, Australia and Japan, received her BFA in painting and printmaking from the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, Mo., and her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Murphy had a predilection for art from an early age—as evidenced by a cherished photograph her parents have of her as a young girl at a little table immersed in the flow of drawing— and that artistic impulse was further nourished by her parents’ vocations and avocations. “My dad was a scientist—a hematologist oncologist who studied blood—and my mom has her Ph.D. in Irish literature,” Murphy says. “They both had a love of culture, and we lived all over the world; and wherever we lived, we would always go to museums. I was raised in this kind of world where the museum became my cathedral.”
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