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Mysticism, in its various secular and non-secular guises, opens everyday experience to non-physical and metaphysical speculation. It gestures toward an unseen order. It sidesteps the hard questions of truth and the empirical interrogation of objects of knowledge, and promotes a getaway for the soul, a kind of luxury cruise for the askers of ‘What am I doing here?’ and ‘Where am I going?’—the big questions to which organised religions and schools of new age spiritualist thought have for a long time attempted a response. For about a decade now, Kate Murphy has been making videos, often in the genre of portraiture, that, amongst other things, draw upon her religious upbringing. These include works whose content is more-or-less overtly Catholic, such as Prayers of a mother (1999) and Rehearsal (for Saint Vitus) (2008), as well as ones that are more latently Catholic in their make-up, such as her project Cry me a future, the first installment of which was shot in Dublin in 2006.
Cry me a future (Dublin) is a self-portrait located in the past, present and future. The twelve-minute video is a head and shoulders shot of the artist looking directly at the camera, wearing a red paper Christmas bon-bon crown and headphones. Intermittently, she is crying. The soundtrack is a monologue spoken by a clairvoyant performing a psychic reading for Murphy. In the reading, the psychic gives some evaluation of Murphy’s character, outlines her strengths and weaknesses and offers insights into her future. It includes classic clichés of crystal ball gazing, like prediction of travel. The psychic creates a bridge of communication to deceased relatives and lingers on description of a ‘spirit’ who is identified as... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline