How pottery helped a son heal, on the banks of the Katherine River
Updated
Surrounded by bush and cicadas, Danny Murphy and his mother Ruth spent years sculpting clay at opposite ends of their ramshackle tin work shed. Now, her seat is empty.
Mr Murphy said he stumbled into potting in high school, when he decided to take art because "it seemed like a good bludge."
"I knew mum couldn't say 'no, you've got to do maths'," he said.
Ruth Murphy had been sculpting pots and cups and vases for almost a decade by then, raising four boys who grew up "throwing leeches at each other" and floating down the Katherine River in tyre tubes.
"That was before the crocodiles," Mr Murphy said of his favourite childhood pastime.
The boys collected clay from creek beds for their mother, who also got tip offs from the local roadworks teams whenever they spotted a promising looking puddle.
Mr Murphy's earliest forays into his mum's workshop were not his finest.
"I know I accidentally wrecked a couple, being silly and getting too close to the pots," he said.
Two lives' work in a tin shed
After high school art class though, the bludge became a career.
"Pottery just stuck and I kept doing it, I did some courses and just got stuck into it," Mr Murphy said.
Having spent time living in Adelaide, he began returning to work alongside his mother at the family home in Katherine, mostly in companionable silence.
"Often we wouldn't even talk all that much, but at the end of each day we'd look at what each other had done and give each other a pat on the back," he said.
"It was more of a friendship than a mother-son sort of set-up."
Then, a few years ago, she got sick.
Ms Murphy began to lose weight after a fall and was ultimately diagnosed with cancer and emphysema.
"Mum said 'I'm ready to go' two or three years before she did," Mr Murphy recalled.
"She said 'I don't have a problem with being dead, it's just the way I get there, I don't want to be in any pain or suffer", and she meant it.
"She was potting 10 days before she died ... it was a very difficult time though, those five days dying, I wish it had gone quicker."
Picking up the pieces in a new exhibition
Mr Murphy cared for his mum until she died last year.
This year the curator of Katherine's Godinymayin Rivers Arts and Culture Centre invited Mr Murphy to help craft a retrospective exhibition of his and his mother's work.
He decided it was time to complete the unfinished pieces his mum had left behind.
"The last year and a half I'd walk around and see all mum's pots raw and my heart would just drop a little bit," he said.
"But then I got stuck into [finishing them] ... it's an honour to be able to do it, and to do justice to a good woman."
He said he had "a lot of cups of tea" while travelling around town collecting works for the exhibition, with almost all his mother's pieces now out of the family hands.
"[Before she died] I said to mum "you're going to die one day", and she said "yes", and I said "well I'm your biggest fan, I don't have any of your pots"," he said.
A selection of her pots are on display, beside his, at the Godinymayin Centre until Saturday 10 December.
Topics: sculpture, ceramic, family, grief, darwin-0800, katherine-0850
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