While talking on the phone, or sitting at his desk otherwise engaged, MacMurtrie would continuously carve forms into his wooden desk. The lack of attention paid to the process of creating these images brought out subconscious meanderings that were elaborated over years. The creatures, shapes, and relationships depicted in the desk carvings were sandwiched into each other and worked to completion. The act of carving brought these subconscious ideas into three dimensions. In looking at these characters, MacMurtrie became interested in the idea of bringing them to life as machines.

The clear subconscious origin, and shape of the composition as a whole, suggested the appropriate venue for this cadre of machines should recall the source from which the images originally sprang. Cave of the Subconscious is the primordial artistic brain, rife with half-formed desires, images, and sounds.

The original carvings suggested that the machines’ movements would intersect, forming a kind of dialogue of shape, motion and sound. Over the years the Cave has been developed, the compressed composition of the desk carvings has not yet been reached. Each time the exhibition is assembled, the original concept is more fully realized with the addition of new machines and the elaboration of old ones.

Cave of the Subconscious is an exhibition inspired by the images that reside in an ancestral subconscious. The Cave’s hollow interior allows the audience to enter this subconscious world of mechanical images. As the viewers move through the space and interact with the Cave’s figures, they act both as voyeurs and as creative participants–transforming the fantastical representations of the machines. The Cave’s inhabitants represent the physical and metaphorical permutations of humanity’s subconscious uprisings of memory and lineage. As the machines perform, gesticulate, and navigate the Cave’s interior, they symbolize the ways in which heredity and evolution affect human life.

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