Nicole Donnely
Muriel Condon
Muriel Condon received her BFA from Montana State University in Printmaking and Painting in 2016. That summer she was an assistant at Frogman’s Print Workshops in Omaha, Nebraska. Soon after the workshops wrapped up, she moved to Corvallis, Oregon, where she has resided for three years. She spent the spring of 2017 exploring the interaction of cloth and print as a postgraduate apprentice at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. In Eugene, Oregon, Muriel continued to work with fabric and printing at Whiteaker Printmakers, where she eventually worked as a summer assistant. Before moving to Knoxville, she participated in the Print Arts Northwest’s Emerging Printmaker residency and was an instructional assistant for screen printing at Linn-Benton Community College.
Currently Muriel is pursuing her MFA in Printmaking at University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Artist Statement
In my practice I employ print, fiber, and paper to examine nostalgia and tactility. The work uses
metaphors of food and domestic objects as surrogates for the body, allowing for moments of
comfort, humor, and awareness of impermanence.
In the studio I expose or break down the interior matter of soft, organic, commonplace material
and transform paper and fabric into pseudo useful objects, sheets or vessels. The work holds
the action of process, especially paper, whose churning and digestive way of coming into being
resembles the way consuming food reconstitutes itself as your body. In the work there is a light
nod to the proverbial food consumption phrase “you are what you eat,” with its parallel to new
materialism’s perspective of matter and objects defining us, rather than us defining them.
My tablescapes celebrate anti-opulence and an exaggerated humility of things within a setting
that is commonly portrayed as lavish: a set dining table. Many of the materials chosen are
reused and reformed, an activity which is prompted in life by either necessity or sustainability.
The work conversation oscillates between insecurity, restriction, and rose colored
representations of the past, à la Better Homes and Gardens.
I investigate the insubstantiality and unfulfilling nature of material consumption while also inviting the therapeutic nature of
collecting material goods to mix with the joyful appreciation for material resourcefulness. The vessel objects are constructed out of paper and unglazed clay, announcing their uselessness and fragility. The food sculptures are mere depictions rather than nourishment. In making these playful, malleable, domestic vignettes I hope to invite private association and communal engagement, be it mentally or in moments of invited participation.