Stephen Murphy wins RCSI award for a sculpture of his premature newborn son

Stephen Murphy has won this year’s RCSI Art Award, in association with the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) and The Irish Times, for his sculpture, titled Newborn (The Hardest Day of Your Short Life Yet).

Murphy’s piece was inspired by the premature birth of his son, PJ, last year. The white sculpture, which is about 2/3rd of life-size, is cast in jesmonite and depicts PJ lying on his tummy, his favourite sleeping position, in the incubator at Limerick University Maternity Hospital.

PJ, or Patrick Jerry, after his two grandfathers, spent his first six weeks in the neonatal department there. Visible on his tiny body are heart and blood pressure monitors, a plaster on his lower back (from a lumbar puncture) and an IV on his arm. The hardest day was when he had “a whole gamut of tests which would be draining on an adult, let alone a premature baby”.

Murphy said: “Our baby, PJ, he’s a miracle – I’m not kidding. He had so many obstacles, he shouldn’t even exist.” He was born at 31.5 weeks and was 1.5kg (“or one and a half bags of sugar”). Now, a sturdy 15 months old, PJ and his mother, Rosie Byrne, (who Murphy met at Limerick School of Art and Design: “She’s a real virtuoso artist”) came along to the ceremony for his dad’s award.

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He said it was “a real joy and honour” that Newborn was chosen for the award, especially as “so many of the people who helped us through this were RCSI alumni. Of any award I could win, this means so much.”

Cork-born, Limerick-based Murphy received the award – the RCSI Silver Medal, €5,000 to progress his practice and a €10,000 commission for a new piece for RCSI’s collection – at a ceremony on Wednesday.

It was selected from a shortlist of five from more than 560 works in the 193rd RHA Annual Exhibition, Ireland’s largest and longest running visual art exhibition. Now in its eighth year, the RCSI Art Award celebrates associations between art, medicine and wellbeing.

“The RHA and RCSI have been so important to us,” said Murphy. “They have given me so much already. The process of creating the sculpture was purely cathartic, capturing that difficult moment in time and compartmentalising all of the emotion.”

He has had many messages about “how Newborn affects people in different ways,” he said, “as a catalyst for conversations, some happy, some sad, some absolutely devastating. Medicine allows us to recuperate, to convalesce, to heal our bodies and minds. And art complements those processes, allowing us, through its making, enjoyment and observation, the opportunity to heal the more elusive, ephemeral, esoteric and existential aspects of our self.”

His work, which he describes as “restrained and measured – not like me, personally”, spans drawing, painting, printmaking, collage and, more recently, sculpture, as well as teaching art. He describes how as their baby lay in the incubator in the maternity hospital, his wife “took hundreds of photos” of him from every angle. Later, those photos gave him plenty of reference material to sculpt him in three dimensions.

The limited edition sculpture is for sale and is “like a saint pulling off a miracle and tri-locating in Dublin, Limerick and London” this summer, where it’s in the Royal Academy Summer Show and Limerick City Gallery of Art, as well as Dublin’s RHA.

“I can quantify for you the stages of a baby,” he said: foetus, premature, newborn, infant, toddler. “They all have unique features. He was so premature he didn’t have cartilage in his ears, which would fold like a piece of paper. He was in a foetal position for two days after birth. When I visited him the first time, I was in tears. I said to the neonatal nurse, ‘He doesn’t realise he’s born. He’s acting like he’s in the womb.’”

RCSI vice-chancellor, professor Cathal Kelly, said the award is a celebration of “the important link between art and medicine. We look forward to seeing the artwork Stephen will create for the RCSI art collection, which enriches our campus experience and inspires students, staff and visitors.”

The other shortlisted artists from the RHA Annual Exhibition were Humans by Liam Belton RHA; Listener by Rachel Joynt RHA; Bedside Table by Niamh Porter; and Martina Prendergast, 12th October 1964 – 3rd July 2022 by Blaise Smith RHA. The RHA Annual Exhibition runs until July 30th.