by Dev Murphy
This piece and its accompanying abstract comic originally appeared in The Rupture
In the art gallery, the door opens inward, but when they leave, visitors try to push instead of pull. I suspect there is something about small spaces—or art, maybe—that makes a person feel they are bursting forth when they leave, being born. They try to push, and then they look at me at my desk, they are embarrassed, and then they pull.
The difference between pushing and pulling—or more interestingly, or just as interestingly, the difference between being sure you can push out, and finding you must instead pull in. . . . People leave the gallery with a strange confidence sometimes. Jules Michelet wrote that a bird uses its whole body to build its nest. “The instrument that prescribes a circular form for the nest is nothing else but the body of the bird. It is by constantly turning round and round and pressing back the walls on every side, that it succeeds in forming this circle.”
I like to believe visitors to the gallery are empowered by the minutes spent walking about the room, nesting. But the nest energy, the building-out, is interrupted by the jolt of a door that won’t obey, and by the realization that they cannot reenter real life by bursting forth, but by making themselves smaller for a moment.
Dev Murphy is a writer, illustrator, and editor based out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is the author of I’m not I’m not I’m not a baby (Ethel Press 2023), a collection of prose poems, abstract comics, and short essays about God, tiny animals, and loneliness. Her writing and illustrations have been featured in Diagram, The Cincinnati Review, ANMLY, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Her visual art has been shown in art galleries throughout the Pittsburgh region, including SPACE, Concept, You Are Here, and the Irma Freeman Center for Imagination. This piece reflects on her time as a gallery attendant for the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.
PETRICHOR 
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