David Murphy

David Murphy is a visual artist and designer, living and working in Naarm/Melbourne. The bulk of his work in the past 20 years has been in site-specific, public artworks, although he also creates ephemeral, performance-based works and theatre design.

His artwork is strongly influenced by maths and science, with the Fibonacci numbers and the Golden Ratio being a recurring theme. It’s the relationship between this number - the most irrational number known to maths - and DNA, the molecule at the core of all known life, that is driving much of his current arts practice.

Fibonacci Sequenced  is an accurate portrait of DNA. It illustrates how the one molecule that is essential to all of life as we know it relates to the Golden Ratio/Phi  and the Fibonacci numbers, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc. The artwork depicts 13  full turns of DNA at a scale of one to four billion, making it 13m long, and 62cm in diameter.  

The  genome of the most common enzyme on the planet - Rubisco - will be encoded as scrolling light, colour and sound. Rubisco is the enzyme that all plants use to split the carbon dioxide molecule in order to use the carbon atom in their structure, releasing oxygen  in the process. This is the primary way that carbon enters our biosphere.

Paul Lim -  Lighting and System Design

Stephen Grant -  Sound Design