Val Murray

TEA:
Since 1987 Val Murray has worked as a member of the collaborative team of artists TEA which also includes Jon Biddulph, Peter Hatton and Lynn Pilling. TEA is currently engaged on a long-term investigation into the nature and representation of places. This is a spatial practice that relates to current expanded definitions of place. Places are understood as complex, multi-layered interactions between physical reality and images, surface appearance and lived experience.

TEA's current series of City Mapping projects aims
• to explore places as living, social spaces, where relationships and activities, as well as past, present and future, interweave with the physical environment.
• to map - i.e. reveal, document and represent this layered identity of physical places.
• to challenge conventional assumptions about how and by whom a place is identified and represented.

Each City Mapping project
• investigates a unique place activated by particular individuals (including TEA)
• uses a variety of direct and indirect processes
• raises different issues and requires appropriate strategies
• constructs a mediated version of an urban environment.
• puts the site in a state of flux as the activity both documents and generates social identities.

Methods used include
• journeys, interview, questionnaire, video and sound recording, still photography
• working with a range of specialists and users of the locations to document a range of perceptions.
• mediated representations of the places investigated in the form of installation, video for the small screen, publication, archive, CD-Rom.
• adding further layers of perception and identity to the subject through the context of viewing and audience interaction / contribution.

The work can be seen as ‘Public Art’ because
• it offers a critique of public / private space
• of the participation of citizens and other professionals
• it expands roles of artists in the contemporary urban experience.