Michael Murrell and Hal Jacobs
Hal Jacobs and Michael Murrell
Documentary
Michael Murrell: Art, Nature and Catawampus
May 2021
Hal Jacobs of HJacobs Creative has made a documentary of sculptor Michael Murrell. Both are Hambidge Fellows.
Film Trailer: https://vimeo.com/501755864
“For five decades, sculptor Michael Murrell has made work that explores our human relationship with nature. He is drawn to the spiritual qualities in the artworks and utilitarian objects of other cultures, specifically Oceanic, African, and Native American, an ethnographic interest he combines with an accumulation of personal experience to inform much of his long career. With over 200 exhibitions of his work, Murrell has chosen to retain most of it so that it can be displayed to the public in a former cotton mill located along the Soque River in Habersham County in the north Georgia foothills. Murrell was on the faculty of the Georgia State University Art Department from 1984 to 2009.
I first met Michael in 2014 at the Hambidge Center for the Arts & Sciences while working on a short film about founder Mary Hambidge. At the time he was working on a 10-foot tower constructed of bones and skulls of various animals he had collected over his lifetime. How could you not want to know more about an artist like that? A few years later I helped him with a short video related to the stump of a chestnut tree in the national forest that he memorialized in an art piece. Wanting to hang out with him more and, in collaboration with Joe Boris and Henry Jacobs, led to the 24-minute film that’s being submitted to film festivals — most recently it became an official selection of the Modern Art Film Festival in Venice, Cal." - 2017, Director Hal Jacobs
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