'Sleeping in Spearmint'
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Benita Murray — ‘Spearmint and Tin’
Forthcoming Exhibition — The Muse Gallery of Milawa
The Muse Gallery of Milawa is pleased to announce a forthcoming exhibition of sculptures and wall-panels by Benita Murray.
Benita will be exhibiting a series of sculptural works produced over the last 18 months in her small home studio in Bright. Benita creates patterned three-dimensional panels and freestanding sculptures constructed of pressed tin, rusted sheet iron, steel meshes, and twisting wire cables and rods. The title of this exhibition, ‘Spearmint and Tin,’ refers to her use of a spearmint-coloured pressed metal from the 1920s: currently her favourite material. Benita’s art is unique for the way in which it uses hard materials to create works that are emotionally soft and nostalgic.
‘Spearmint and Tin’ centres around nostalgic themes, often inspired by childhood memories of country life, and the ‘archetypical’ female zones of home, interiors and clothing design. A wall panel titled ‘Sleeping in spearmint’, 
features cutout love-hearts ‘falling’ through rusted bedsprings, and is inspired by childhood memories of diving into a big feather mattress at her great-aunt Laura’s house, to lie there and stare up at the pressed metal ceiling. The love-heart is a reoccurring motif in her work, which she says ‘softens them.’
Benita’s art also draws inspiration from the rural environment, and from her fascination with fabrics and textiles in high fashion clothing. Comparing her works to old-fashioned heavily embossed wallpaper, her sculptural pieces also read almost as maps of the land, its built environments and the people who have lived there over time.
Rust is an important visual theme in all of Benita’s pieces. ‘To be honest, I fell into using the rusty stuff because I love hanging around old farm tips: the ones with great piles of rusted metal built up over generations,’ she says. The particular age of the materials influence each work for the way in which they recall domestic or workplace interiors of a certain era. ‘Some of the tin I use I’ve had in storage for over ten years, and the pieces themselves are often over 100 years old.’
The natural hues of the metal also impact upon the formulation of her sculptures. ‘The colour of rust always differs, depending on where it’s come from,’ she explains.
Benita says she loves the tactile experience of sculpture, and has no plans to change her materials. ‘I can’t let go of my passion for working with old rusted metal. I thought by now I would have moved onto another medium, but I’m still so excited by it. I love it.’
Having trained formally at the Claremont School of Art in Western Australia, Benita concludes that she considers this most recent body of work a continuation of her investigation of the relationships between people, the land and their mutual environments, both physical and cultural. ‘But it’s also a new adventure for me, because this time I’m working on a larger scale than ever before.’
‘Spearmint and Tin’ will be on formally opened at 2pm Saturday October 4th (proudly sponsored by Wood Park Wines & The Milawa Cheese Factory) and will be on display until the 20th of October 2008. Members of the public are cordially invited to attend.