Spring 2026 Events
THURSDAY, APRIL 30: Meg Lionel Murphy (UW-Madison, Art)
5:00 pm, Elvehjem L150, Lecture “Flowering Wounds: Medieval Imagery and the Healing Body”
Medieval art offers contemporary painters a set of visual and conceptual strategies for releasing internal suffering into external, communal repair. Across devotional manuscripts, protective charms, bestiaries, and apocalyptic texts, the body becomes a site of growth, protection, and spiritual power. Moving from medieval spell-casting to mid-century surrealism and contemporary myth-making, a lineage emerges of artists invested in rendering the body as living technology: a flowering wound, a lactating saint, a figure mid-metamorphosis. Such images do not merely represent pain, but perform it, transmute it, and carry it across time. Ultimately, Murphy will offer an intimate vantage into a painting practice where image-making itself functions as a ritual of protection and emergence.
Meg Lionel Murphy began her art practice after surviving severe domestic violence, leaving a career in publishing to begin an artistic world-building project rooted in trauma and transformation. In the tradition of Remedios Varo and John Wilde, her subjects are scaled so large they become landscape and memorial, holding witness and warning. She is currently an MFA candidate in Painting at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Murphy is represented by Portrait Society Gallery, has exhibited nationally at museums, galleries, and art fairs, and her work has been featured in Forbes, Hyperallergic, and New American Paintings.
See more of Murphy’s work here.
Click here to view the event poster
Co-sponsored by Anonymous Fund and the departments of Art, Art History, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Integrated Liberal Studies.