Welcome to the [Mono]seum. My name is Nicole Murray and I'm the exhibiting artist this month. I'm a sculptor and I work across many other visual art forms too. Painting, design, textiles. I'm also a performer. I play, sing and write folk music and I've toured around the world as a performer for many years. I've made art and music since I was a child in Townsville. I gained my degree in 10 studio areas and teaching in Melbourne. By the fourth year of my degree, I specialised in sculpture and I was lucky to train with master sculptor Peter Corlett. I love to work in modelling and casting processes using clay and wax rather than reductive ones like carving. I could see from Peter's practice that working on major public sculptures required diplomatic skills and negotiating skills that I just I felt I didn't have and would have trouble acquiring and I began to work in painting and other forms and then my music career started to take off. My visual and performance art practices are often intertwined as they are in the piece that you see before you. So this is how it came about. I toured with John Thompson, a beautiful man who was a brilliant singer, a comedian, songwriter, barrister, multi-instrumentalist in a band we called Cloudstreet. In 2002 we married and we toured regularly around Australia and did 10 extended tours in the UK over 20 years. We made nine albums and some of our songs are sung by other people. John wrote a song called 'The Green Man' about the guardian spirit of the trees, which became popular. But in 2017 John was diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer and life was profoundly changed. Late in his illness I said I would like to make a sculpture of him, a portrait of him as the green man which I would like to put on his grave. We were talking pretty frankly. He was very keen on the idea and cooperated on the first part of the work. In 2021 during the lockdown years he died. It took me quite some time to reorganise my life. And then, with the help of my dear friend Peter Corlett, the sculptor, who provided workspace, advice and moral support, I created this portrait of John. I worked in clay at first, then I used a waste mould to cast a wax and continued to work directly in wax. But eventually I made a silicone mould so I could create an edition. I made an edition of two bronzes, one of which stands on his grave at Toowong Cemetery and one of which is here and later this year it will be installed permanently at Woodfordia where John was involved as a beloved performer and in other ways for over 30 years. If I were to offer any advice to someone beginning their art practice, it would be this - Learn good skills. Seek out good training. It can be a degree, but it might also be short courses and on-the-job work. Get lots of skills and follow the ones that excite you the most. Because the more active you are in your field, the more opportunities you will see. Include some business training in those skills you acquire, so you can keep track of the money, because that allows you to keep making art. Now that I've made this sculpture, I'm very keen to sculpt in clay again. And I've also begun to tour and perform again as a soloist. Naturally the song I have chosen to go with this exhibition is 'The Green Man'.