ABOUT US

The Murphy lot were like a box of pups. 

Five brothers and a sister: noses and tails and ribs and paws, squirming, kicking, yelping. Tearing through the house, clawing at the furniture, stripping everything edible. Falling asleep. Waking up, one eyebrow, an ear cocked to the rhythms of the house. It’s on. Doing it all over again.

One day even the biggest families will divide and rebuild in other places, and brothers Liam and Finn roamed around but eventually returned to southwest Victoria, between the paddocks and the sea. Both had lived a half-lifetime – Liam as a teacher and Finn as a sparky and project manager. Older now, long limbed and less inclined to gnaw at shoes, they rediscovered each other through a whole new medium: their art.

Liam’s irreverent canvases are well-known these days: geometrics that play with colour and form, patterns that feel sonic in their repetitions and occasional inversions. Finn is no less talented, but his surprises are only just emerging. Laser-cut aluminium plates, canvases of bold, uninhibited block chromatics, and somewhere on the back palate, that same sense of flat-out mischief that characterises his older brother’s work.

Mungo Mungo is all this, collected for the first time. Named after the patron saint of salmon and Glasgow, Mungo Mungo make and collect Quality art and objects in limited runs. Locally hand-made, sustainable and celebrating the community that makes it. A standing show, a rolling carnival on the backroads of fibre to the node. 

Perched at a kitchen bench over a thoughtful beer, the Brothers Murphy poke and provoke, ponder and wander through the elements that capture their bond.

And their kids hurtle around them, throwing and hollering and making and breaking. And they wonder how anybody raises pups. 

 

- Jock Serong