My Practice
My practice explores emotion through metaphor, focusing on the symbiosis between hope and light, darkness and despair.
Artist Biography
After sketching in my spare time for years, I made the decision in 2023 to commit fully to being an artist.
At the age of 16 I left school and home, embarking on a series of engineering and office-based jobs including toolmaking, radio-frequency microelectronics design and cyber security — often initially as the only woman in the room. Maybe I designed part of a mobile phone you used in the past?
In September 2023, I left my job and launched myself into the practice and study of art, at first informally online and in galleries.
In June 2025 I completed the Advanced Certificate in Fine Art at Hampstead School of Art. Formal study helped push my practice beyond graphite and watercolour into charcoal, pastels, oils and acrylics. My recent explorations in painting have opened new ways of working, where I have expanded my artistic ideas using varying colour palettes and increasing scale.
I am currently enrolled on a Studio Year at Hampstead School of Art. I continue to full immerse myself in creating work that is challenging, hopeful and beautiful.
Exhibitions & Prizes
June-July 2025
Graduation Exhibition, Hampstead School of Art
Dream of Freedom series
Sept-Oct 2025
ArtGeminiPrize Finalists Exhibition
Winner “Artist of the Year” Prize
Dream of Freedom II
Reviews
Dream of Freedom series
Anna Murphy’s Dream of Freedom is a visually arresting and conceptually rich body of work that delves into the emotional tensions between utopia, decay, and the fragmented self.
The largest painting evokes a pastoral, almost empty landscape, soaked in the golden glow of a filmic Hollywood-ending sunset. From the earth, hands emerge—eerily reaching—before giving way to a subterranean underworld: a gutsy red interior filled with disembodied feet and haunting masks. This surreal, abject space evokes the soft, melting forms of Dalí, and hints at resurrection, memory, and return.
A mid-sized vertical work continues this exploration of the underworld, repeating the visceral red motif peppered with masks and limbs.
A smaller painting echoes the same cinematic sunset but omits figures, drawing attention to absence and atmosphere.
In a striking blue composition zombie-like hands creep up from below as the sky is filled with the hazy blue bloom of the sun—hope and dread entangled.
Murphy’s research includes a sketchbook filled with loose, expressive notation and some historical references—Picasso and Sarah Morris.
A paper painting pinned to the wall features a screaming face, a foot, a hand, and a limb— fragmented forms that resonate with early modernist ideas of the dissected body. This recalls Picasso’s pictorial fragmentation and even the emotive studies of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa.
Murphy’s work powerfully investigates the psychology of the body within landscapes of illusion. Dream of Freedom offers a compelling vision of happy endings haunted by cycles of loss, decay, and return.
External Examiner, Hampstead School of Art
