BY RYAN O’CONNOR

Though Patricia Murphy’s sculptures are fictitious characters created in her head, every once in awhile one just happens to look like someone she or someone else knows.

That is exactly what happened to Murphy when she created Dusty, one of her favorite pot sculptures.

“When I finished him, I called my husband and said, ‘Come see Dusty,’” she said. “When he saw him, my husband declared he looked just like the neighbor, Peter Weeks, across the street, and I guess it’s true. They all look like somebody, this one just happened to look like the guy across the street.”

Since then, she had another neighbor purchase one of her Dusty sculptures after seeing it, and even Weeks himself decided to buy one.

“But Murphy insists the correlation is unintentional, though she admits her subconscious memory may play a role in her creations.

“I like faces. I like expression. I like common faces,” she said. “I call this the lifting of the common man, because we’re taking regular everyday looking people and we’re making them fancy. And we’re making them special by putting gold paint on them and making them interesting.”

Murphy, who in her 30s, went to the University of New Hampshire to get a degree, took art as a general education requirement and decided she loved it so much she would make a career of it. She graduated with a bachelor of fine arts and sculpture degree and has been making head pot sculptures ever since.

“I have about 20 years working in nurseries with plants, so I had the landscaping background and ended up with my fine arts degree in sculpture, so I combined the two,” she said. “They’re pot heads – they’re pots and they’re heads, so they’re pot heads.”

Murphy makes the originals out of clay then makes rubber molds with outer plastic molds and casts her sculptures in cement to create a final product.

“It’s a long process and a lot of work,” she said of designing and creating her more than 30 different sculpture designs.

Recently, she began making leaf-peepers and sculptures with hats that come off, which transforms her creations from standard sculptures to more practical pots.

Murphy opened her two businesses, Dunbarton Arts and Gardens, out of her home on Route 13 five years ago.

“I needed to stay home, so I decided to do what I know, sculpture and plants, so we started this business here on nothing more than a shoestring,” she said. “It’s been building and building ever since.”
But her work isn’t always easy.

“One thing people think about artists is it’s very glamorous, but it’s not,” she said. “It’s very lonely spending hours and hours in your studio hammering out problems, technical difficulties, figuring out how things are going to work, and trying to create this idea. You have this idea and now you have to make it real. But when you finally get it, you want to share it with somebody.”

Which is one of the reasons she began The Arts and Gardens Festival last year.

“When you have the festival, all these artists come with all their creations that are beautiful and they’ve put all this work into, and all they want is somebody to come over and say, ‘Wow, that’s really nice,’” said Murphy. “It’s not so much to show it off. It’s to connect with somebody that understands and appreciates what you’re doing after all those long lonely hours.”

She described the process of thinking of an idea, creating it, having someone appreciate it, and gaining encouragement to go back into the studio to start the process all over again as the circle of art.

Ironically, Murphy and two other local artists combined their efforts and resources to create “The Circle of Art,” a week-and-a-half festival taking place at three separate locations.

“You have so much more power when you have other people helping you because you can get three times as much done,” said Murphy. “Between the three of us we’ve been able to pull in at least 100 artists, which is obviously very impressive and exciting for all of us. I just can’t believe the response that we’ve had by pooling our energies.”

The Dunbarton Arts and Gardens Festival will be located at Murphy’s business at 14 Stark Highway North (Route 13) just outside Dunbarton Center, on May 4, 5, 6, 12, and 13.

The Artisan-A-Faire, which will feature top area artisans and demonstrations, will be located at 66 Long Pond Road in Dunbarton the same dates as Murphy’s portion of the event.

And The Cat Show, featuring various forms of art depicting felines throughout the world, will take place at Black Brook Gallery, at 597 Black Brook Road, on the Goffstown/Dunbarton border right through from May 4 through 13.