Luxurious Labour

Charlie Murray

March 1 - 30, 2025

Organized by Anthony Cooper


pitting the plumb: an imploded system
John Nyman

There’s only one idea.

There’s always more space.

The idea is to go in the opposite direction of where you are expected to go.

Given the room, take to the walls. Given the sky, take to the earth.

For fifteen years, Charlie Murray has been quietly at work on The Underground Space Station, initiated with his cousin Thomas Vanderzaag on the headland of an industrial farm in Alliston, Ontario. The Underground Space Station is a many-chambered intervention into the earth, complete with Leisure Module, Purification Cube, and a magnificent Observatory, built from discarded farming materials into hand-dug holes several stories deep into the earth.

Like the portals in the walls of the plumb, The Underground Space Station has depended on consultation with a cast of intuitive engineers, but has ultimately depended on a great deal of solitary energy. Solitude is always relative. The presence of massive ironwoods, starving chipmunks, coyotes and more worms than you ever thought possible have witnessed and rustled through the longest, headlamp-lit nights of shoveling. The Underground Space Station has survived and experienced crises of flooding and collapse, changes of personnel, and other existential threats in the manner of any space station.  Charlie describes the deep  exhilaration of a day’s, night’s, or year’s shoveling through soft earth and hard clay without guarantee of progress, the pervasion of the soil’s nutrients and pesticides, the satisfaction of exhaustion, and the bliss of finding more cavernous space in the ground underneath our feet.

Through this exploration, he has constructed a space station for contemplation -  with portholes onto what we might forget, the dazzling earthscape under our feet, where there once was a bomb shelter.

In this intervention, Murray imposes his heartfelt excavation on the gallery, persuading and inventing his way through eighteen inches of brick and ten  feet of earth through the mystery of the gap between the plumb’s walls. His determined yet relaxed style of intervention, with the chime of invented tools and occasional crowd-sourced man- and brainpower, preserve the mystery. The project expels surprisingly damp earth out and invites headlamp light in to the core of the plumb.

While the artist rests from his probing, he gnaws his way through a 2” x 4”.

Given the sky, take to the earth. Given the room, take to the walls.

There’s always more space.

There’s only one idea.


Text by Lee Suski