Micheal Murrel: Art, Nature, and Catawampus

For five decades, sculptor Michael Murrell has made work that explores our human relationship with nature. He is drawn to the spiritual qualities in the artworks and utilitarian objects of other cultures, specifically Oceanic, African, and Native American, an ethnographic interest he combines with an accumulation of personal experience to inform much of his long career. Though his sculpture draws deeply from these various sources, Murrell pushes his form beyond the referent to become something completely new - so new that certain pieces feel like discoveries rather than constructions. With over 200 exhibitions of his work, Murrell has chosen to retain most of it so that it can be displayed to the public in a former cotton mill in the north Georgia foothills.