Exhibition Overview
Contents
+/- 70 photographs
2 moving image works
Matthew Murray’s personal notebooks
Dimensions
Various
Public Programming
Photographer is available for an artist-led workshop, a guided tour, and a lecture
Curator
Addie Elliott
Contact Details
info@elliott.gallery
+31 (0)6 85724797
Fee
Please inquire.
In a strip of post-industrial wasteland on the edge of Birmingham, a child found a world of his own. Millstream Way is a deeply personal, experimental exploration of childhood memories, loss and grief — and of how photography can give access to experiences that have gone unremembered yet cannot be forgotten.
At the heart of the project is Millstream Way itself: a former industrial site in Birmingham (since transformed into a vibrant nature reserve) where Matthew Murray spent much of his childhood. He found in it a space for play, adventure, and refuge. Later, following the loss of his mother when he was twelve, the site became something more. It engages throughout the work with the idea of the ‘secret garden’: both literally, as a hidden and neglected yet magical space for childhood adventure, and metaphorically, as a place of healing, self-discovery, and growth.
In his photographic approach, Murray recalls his childhood adventures and grief through a personal and phenomenological lens, balancing the tension between loss and moments of play, absorption, and solace. The work blends digital and analogue techniques (photogravure, Polaroids, trail cameras, 3D printing, and moving image) and embraces experimentation, chance, and imperfection to reflect the freedom and unpredictability of childhood memory itself. The result is a body of work that is at once haunting and meditative.
Situated within the traditions of landscape and documentary photography that explore memory and history through place, Millstream Way brings a distinctive working-class perspective to questions of loss, the picturesque, and the relationship between environment and inner life. The work also engages with contemporary interests in walking, play, and wellbeing as both artistic and emotional practices, and offers strong potential for public programming around themes of childhood memory, grief, and photographic experimentation.
The exhibition is accompanied by a photobook of the same title, published by Elliott Gallery (2027).
Millstream Way will be exhibited at aqb, Hungary, from 15 January 2027.
…playing in those types of 'nothing/non spaces.' indeterminate space between landscape and the urban. Where kids congregate, older kids meet girls, messing about with mates, jumping off trees onto dumped mattresses, brook jumping, smoking robbed fags from the outdoor, lying in the grass, watching the clouds, playing in burnt out cars, making rope swings across the brook, climbing up manholes to smoke, being chased off the rail tracks, catching sticklebacks in empty plastic butter tubs, bruised faces from fighting, bruised shins from bike pedals, climbing trees, waiting in the ford for cars to go through and soak you through, your mum calling you in for your tea, itchy sweaty backs, bee stings, insect bites, a broken tooth after being hit in the mouth by my sister with a jam jar while catching butterflies. That type of thing.
— Matthew Murray
Matthew Murray
Matthew Murray is a British artist, photographer, and academic whose work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Europe and the United States, including in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Cologne. His photographs are held in the permanent collections of MoMA, New York; Tate, London; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the British Library; and the Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol.
Venues
art quarter budapest - Budapest, Hungary
January 15, 2027 - March 15, 2027