‘A Visit’ marks Murgatroyd’s return to a lifelong curiosity with the Domestic and our photographic relationship to it. Attempting to reconcile and better understand his conflicting feelings towards domestic life, Murgatroyd began to question what it is that makes up a home? What makes this abstract concept so recognisable and familiar?
Attempting to use the camera as a means of critical though, he began photographing his surroundings with the hopes of building the same sense of the Home in the obscure and abstract. When this practice collided with Murgatroyd’s hermitic day to day and flanneuristic social life he began to construct a fictitious Home for himself within his photographs. Cobbled together from stolen fragments of the homes of friends and family, the space that ‘A Visit’ proclaims to documents is one full to the brim of romanticised domestic ideals.
The work leaves us questioning how the mechanisms of sequence and congregation can be leveraged to make falsehoods into stories and half truths into facts. Murgatroyd is left with the realisation that he could always live in his art, but never in his life.