Sculptors Rachel Burns and Ulan Murray work mostly in recycled copper wiring from their home and studio on the NSW South Coast.
It comes as little surprise that sculptors Rachel Burns and Ulan Murray made the copper-panelled kitchen and bathroom doors in the home they share on the NSW South Coast. Of course they did. They pretty much rebuilt the entire dwelling in the century-old former farmhouse overlooking the Brogo River flats with their own hands. Then they created a studio in a shed on the 15-acre (six-hectare) property, added a natural swimming pool complete with dragonflies, lizards, frogs and the occasional snake. They also remodelled a former cubby into a guesthouse and turned the garage into a pavilion with a pizza oven, open fireplace and ancient Balinese/Indian??? timber doors for hosting the friends and family they occasionally welcome to their hillside hideaway.
In art as in life Rachel and Ulan are a formidable team. It’s been that way since they met in Wollongong in 1998 and married within the year. Ulan, who had trained in horticulture and studied biology was working on the landscaping for a building where Rachel was employed as the arts and cultural officer for the local Indigenous Community Development Program, helping the long-term unemployed turn their artistic skills into income-earning projects. For the past 15 years they’ve collaborated on extraordinarily detailed sculptures made from recycled high-voltage copper cable wire collected from scrap yards, which they strip back, unwind and straighten before turning it into works of mesmerising detail. There are some abstract pieces, but the mainstays of Rachel and Ulan’s creative output are renditions of trees set on plasma-cut steel plinths with the trunk and canopy above balanced by a tangle of roots dangling below.
After a false start studying fine arts at the University of Sydney – the architecture students were being given priority in the life-drawing classes, so Rachel left – she moved to Wollongong to study creative arts (painting, print making and sculpture) and has pursued her passion for painting and sculpture ever since, with occasional segues into teaching art, arts management and running a tribal furnishings shop with a friend in Bega for about five years.
“We’re both very proud that we’ve built our entire careers avoiding ‘proper’ [full-time] jobs,” Ulan says. “From the beginning, we’ve worked together, raising our two kids and swapping roles from earning to caring for the children as opportunities presented themselves. We’ve been able to survive as sculptors because we do everything ourselves. Because that’s the way we operate, our renovations have had to wait for us to have the time, energy and occasional influxes of income to get done.”
Keen to build a life as a couple, Rachel and Ulan bought 25 acres (10 hectares) at Mudgee in central western NSW, where they lived while Rachel painted and they built a house. Daughter Indigo was born there and Ulan started exploring an interest in carving stone and working with wood. They moved to their present home in 2003, just in time to welcome son Taj earthside.
“We were incredibly lucky that the previous owners were not great at preparing the property for sale,” Ulan says. “It meant we could afford the place and we’ve been working on it pretty much ever since.” When Australian Country visited, the couple were enjoying a brief respite after a successful exhibition of their work in Sydney. True to form, they arranged pretty much every detail themselves, from transporting the 24 pieces in their van to hiring the gallery space, setting up the exhibition and arranging the myriad other details associated with a show. They’re quietly chuffed that one of the sponsors of Sydney’s annual outdoor exhibition, Sculpture by the Sea, bought one of their works.
“We live remotely and we’re hermits for much of the year,” Rachel says. “We’re happy with our Whippets, Romeo and Frida, and own company, but it’s rewarding to see all the works displayed together and people’s reactions to them. We’re not represented by a gallery by choice, but it can be stressful. We even had to borrow some money from my mother to cover a cash-flow crisis in the lead-up to the exhibition which was the first we’d had in four years due to COVID. She’s always been our biggest supporter and when I mentioned I might have to take an outside job to mount the exhibition, she was quick to respond: ‘No you won’t, just get back to the studio and keep working’.”
Rachel says she and Ulan arrived at their tree motif organically when she was filling in for a lecturer and teaching students to draw trees. “When I saw some cabling, I realised it could be used to make fine foliage and roots,” she says. “The chaotic pattern of nature has always been one of my artistic drivers,” Ulan adds. “Trees have them in spades and river deltas from the air have always fascinated me.” While the division of labour is decided collaboratively, Ulan says he’s most often on the welder making the sketch for the sculptures or plasma-cutting the steel plinths. For high-energy Rachel, the monotonous rhythm of wrapping the foliage and roots is a meditative respite from her 19-to-the-dozen daily life – “it’s like knitting as it’s repetitive and calming”.
Recycling materials is very important to their sustainable ethic. They grow their own vegetables and keep a fruit salad of productive trees, chickens for eggs and occasionally meat, and rotate six sheep across the land to keep the grass down. Internally, the house is a splendid showcase of their own and other artists’ works, with an assortment of rustic furniture and finishes including the copper sheet-covered doors and a giant hardwood beam in the living room that was dragged to the house with a neighbour’s tractor. There’s an entire wall devoted to paintings they’ve bought or been gifted through the years and numerous rugs, vessels and decorative pieces from Indonesia, India, Morocco, Afghanistan and Iran collected on travels or from Rachel’s time with the shop. “A lot of generous people have supported us and bought our work through the years,” Rachel says. “Many of them have become friends. Now it’s our time to support young emerging artists.”
Pandemics permitting, Ulan and Rachel usually hold an exhibition every second year and they’ve exhibited and won awards in sculpture shows and festivals all up and down the east coast of Australia. “I realise I’m incredibly fortunate to have made a living by working full-time at art since I left art school,” Rachel says. “We plan to do more abstracts, but people love the trees so much that they will always be part of our portfolio. It’s nice to be able to evoke the responses people have to our work and no matter how long we’ve been in the business, it’s always a heart moment when someone buys a piece.”
