John Murray is an award-winning Manchester based artist and sculptor who has exhibited throughout the city of Manchester as well as Brussels and at the Pratt Institute, New York. After graduating with a first degree in Fine Art Sculpture from Manchester Metropolitan University in 1999 John was awarded the International Meeting of Sculptors Scholarship culminating in an exhibition at the Espace Cre-Action Gallery, Brussels, Belgium. On completion of his MA in Fine Art in 2001 he helped found the Suite Studios Group and is currently chairman.

Works which clearly illustrate Murray’s ideas and concerns can be seen opposite. Most recently Rollercoaster’ 2002, which playfully maps the movement of the viewer by emulating the way we orient ourselves through the space of the gallery. The structure concerns itself with the creativity of play by taking simple basic units and taking them for a walk. The result is a complex open structure, which is beautiful in both its simplicity and its complexity.

‘ The limits of my language means the limits of my world’ 2001, takes the everyday language of road signs as its starting point in order to build a sculptural landscape of new visual signs that express and in turn, makes sense of the contemporary world we live in. The work finds new visual codes to express headline news stories including the foot and mouth epidemic and race riots. By repeating and juxtaposing old and new signs I build a toy town that is at once playful and poignant.

Both works concern themselves with structure in different ways through the use of multiples. ‘Rollercoaster’ 2002 is an attempt to reconcile and control the movement of the viewer within the gallery space by filling their field of vision. Rather than presenting the viewer with a single object to be navigated they are presented with architecture which moves between rooms and so can never be seen in its totality urging the viewer to travel with, around, under and over the work.

‘ The limits of my language means the limits of my world’ 2001, similarly fills the viewers field of vision but also present fractured narratives within a language structure. The symbols used are from a recognisable everyday language set in groupings of differing configurations and levels of ease of de-coding. The toy town is a game or puzzle to be deciphered and recognised as generic news stories creating a contemporary landscape.