Non-stop re-enactment not only legitimises the conditions and ideologies that it embodies: it is a way of making real– of making architecture’s innate syntheticness seem natural.
—Sam Jacob, from Make It Real: Architecture as Enactment, 2012

Space to Fill represents a search for meaning within the built environment, and deploys the intense focus of representational drawing in an attempt to understand our most common and iterative architectural habits; that which represents our most basic instincts as we naturalize our surroundings. Diluted forms, holding both the whisper of their origin and new meanings conferred by material and context–seemingly too ubiquitous to merit much attention–are here given an undue amount.

The limits of such understanding are also explored, using the medium of drawing again to “resolve the unresolvable,” exposing the lack of information and loss of knowledge which is an inevitable condition of our landscape and lived experience. In fact, this lack of knowledge — translating to a sense of mystery and wonder — can be a casualty of a practice based on relentless looking, and so is reclaimed here.

Failing to find meaning, meaning is conferred. Based on the certainty of the integral relationship of architecture and the human body, the work here attempts to enforce a sense of empathy, wonder, humor and affection that is representative of our personal relationships to the things we construct.

Erin Murray is an artist who lives and works in Philadelphia. Recent solo exhibitions have been at Vox Populi gallery, where she is a current member, Nancy Margolis Gallery in New York, and the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts in Wilmington. In 2012 she was awarded the West Collects acquisition prize and the Fleisher Wind Challenge exhibition grant. You can find her work published in New American Paintings, Tabletop Zine, and Dirty Laundry magazine. She holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art.