Wendy Murray, (born 1974) is a New Zealand-Australian visual artist and arts educator, formerly known as Mini Graff. Under her former persona, Murray worked as an urban street-poster artist between 2003 and 2010, working in and around Sydney's urban fringe. Since 2014, Murray's art expanded into traditional forms of drawing and artist book design, whilst still engaging with social and political issues through poster-making. Murray's use of letraset transfers, accompanied with vibrant colours and fluorescent inks, references the work of studios from the 1960s through to the 1980s, including the community-based Earthworks Poster Collective[1] and Redback Graphix.[2] A 2018 collaboration with The Urban Crew, a 17-person collective of socially engaged geographers, planners, political scientists and sociologists, resulted in the Sydney – We Need to Talk! artist book.[3]
Wendy Murray was born in New Zealand. She gained a Bachelor in Design from Massey University, New Zealand, in 1999 and, following a move to Australia, earned a Master of Fine Arts from the National Art School, Sydney, in 2014. Between 2008 and 2012 she was Project Coordinator at MAY’S – The May Lane Street Art Project, Sydney. Her academic teaching career included positions as Lecturer in Fine Art Printmaking at the National Art School, Sydney between 2010 and 2015, and lecturer in print media at the Sydney College of the Arts between 2011 and 2012 and from 2015 to 2019. Murray was a consultant researcher in Geography and Urban Studies at the University of Western Sydney during 2013–14.[4]
Work as Mini Graff,
The streets and inhabitants of Sydney's urban fringe provided the content and impetus for Wendy Murray's work as Mini Graff. Graff stenciled and printed images onto a variety of media (walls, boards, vinyl, paper, rarely canvas.) Parody, humour and social commentary are common themes in Graff's work – notions that are translated into experiments with scale in public space – from discrete interventions to large-scale installations.[citation needed]
Mini Graff is featured in the video for Deepchild's song "Blackness of the Sea".[5]
Exhibitions and workshops
2019 – Lead artist, Girls Are Not Toys (Workshop), Gympie Regional Art Gallery, QLD, AUS.
2019 – Sydney We Need To Talk! Wendy Murray & Friends, Cross Art Projects.
2019 – Night & Day, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, NSW, AUS.
2018 – Colby Country, Megalo Print Studio + Gallery.
2018 – FEMINAE – Typographic Voices of Women (group exhibition), Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography, Art Center College of Design, CA USA.
2018 – University of Sydney Printer in Residence Award[21]
2018 – Mount Alexander Shire Mechanics Lane poster commission.
2018 – NAVA funding to produce a series of screen prints with Catherine O’Donnell.
2018 – Love is Hard Work – Castlemaine, VIC[22][23]
2017 – The Newtown Hub / Newtown Art Seat (awarded by Inner West Council)[24][25]
2014 – Behind this Smile, Hobsons Bay City Council[26]
2014 – Hobsons Bay City Council Mayoral Fund award to seed a screen print based social enterprise for at risk youth.
2014 – Australian Print Council commission print award
Publications
Rebecca Beardmore, Talking in Print, IMPRINT Magazine, Print Council of Australia, volume 54, No.1, 2019, pp.29–32.
Broke but not Broken, FEMINAE – Typographic Voices of Women, Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography, ArtCenter College of Design, California, 2018, pg. 45–46.[27]
Antonia Aitken, Artist as Conduit, Imprint Magazine, Winter 2015, volume 50, No. 2, 2015.
K. Iveson, C. McAuliffe, W. Murray and M. Peet, Reframing Graffiti and Street Art in the City of Sydney, Report of the Mural, Street Art and Graffiti Review Project, City of Sydney Council, 2014, pp124.
Artist books
Night & Day – Hill End drawings by Wendy Murray, digital, perfect bound, edition 200, 2019.
Sydney – We Need to Talk!, digital, screen print, perfect binding / hand-bound, edition 100, 2018.
Pull Your Punches, digital, perfect bound, edition 75, 2017.
↑ Therese Kenyon, Under a hot tin roof: Art, passion and politics at the Tin Shed art workshop, Power Publications, Sydney, 1995, 152p.
↑ Anne Zagala, Redback Graphix, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2008, 128p.
↑ Vanessa Berry, Talking Across Cities: the Urban Crew’s Sydney – We Need to Talk!’, Sydney – We Need to Talk Blog, 28 September 2018. Accessed 5 January 2019.
↑ Wendy Murray – Artist and Arts Educator (website), www.wendymurray.com.au
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