LAW WARSCHAW GALLERY presents
Deliver Me
by Meg Lionel Murphy
Fall 2026
In Deliver Me, I expand the mythology of Manica Deprica through the lens of matrescence—the profound transformation of becoming a mother. Drawing inspiration from medieval devotional imagery, Celtic charms, folk Catholicism, and feminist worldbuilding, the paintings imagine bodies that exceed the structures meant to contain them. Giants emerge from portals, carry children across apocalyptic landscapes, and move through fields, churches, highways, and small towns while searching for safety, refuge, and one another.
Throughout the exhibition, painting becomes an act of protection. I adapt the Lorica tradition—protective prayers that move deliberately across the body—as a framework for bodily reclamation. The works function as contemporary altarpieces, talismans, and monuments to endurance, inviting viewers to contemplate the care needs of vulnerable bodies amid personal and political upheaval. As White Christian Nationalism seeks to revive nostalgic hierarchies through the language of family, religion, and tradition, Deliver Me turns to fantasy as a form of resistance. Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?”
Escape! Escape! Escape!
As sightings of my giants spread, so does the myth built around them. The inhabitants of Manica Deprica need artwork for their new deities; my paintings become monuments to the giants’ wounds. They are relics, altarpieces, maps, battle standards, and votive offerings.
I have been trying to escape the land that raised me for as long as I can remember. In my work the tractor becomes a symbol of Midwest masculinity—a “heartland” ideal increasingly shaping policy for the rest of the country. Nationalist and fundamentalist movements seek to revive older hierarchies through the language of family, religion, and tradition. The home, church, and state grow increasingly difficult to separate. My giants emerge at a moment when many bodies are once again being asked to become smaller, quieter, and more compliant. They are too large to hide, too visible to ignore, and too angry to fit within the roles imposed upon them.
***
From the Laidcenn’s Lorica,
of the 6th Century:
“Be a helmet of safety to my head, to my crown covered with hair, to my forehead, eyes and triform brain, to snout, lip, face, and temples, to my chin, beard, eyebrows, ears, chaps, cheeks, septum, nostrils, pupils, irises, eyelids, and the like, to gums, breath, jaws, gullet, to my teeth, tongue, mouth, uvula, throat, larynx and epiglottis, cervix, to the core of my head and gristle, and to my neck may there be merciful protection....Protect, with your powerful breastplate my shoulders with their shoulderblades and arms, protect my elbows, cups of the hand and hands, fists, palms, fingers with their nails. Protect my spine and ribs with their joints, back, ridge, and sinews with their bones; protect my skin and blood with kidneys, the area of the buttocks, nates with thighs. Protect my hams, calves, femurs, houghs and knees with knee-joints; protect my ankles with sins and heels, shanks, feet with their soles. Protect my toes growing together, with the tips of the toes and twice five nails; protect my breast, collarbone and small breast, nipples,...”
