Irish/British Artist Helen Kirwan, is the current resident of the programme and will continue the residency until the 21st of May 2021.
The residency will conclude with an exhibition of the artist’s work in CAA Gallery.
Helen Kirwan is an artist working with performance, moving image and installation. Recurring themes are memory and memorial and fragment and trace. She is interested in the question of what is memory and how might it function and be visually represented. She asks what action can be taken, what objects can be assembled and what journeys can be undertaken in the service of memory, and how is time in itself memorial and memory.
Drawing on her own experience of sudden loss and choosing remote outdoor locations such as in Iceland and Connemara, Ireland, she creates videos of her performances of repetitive, absurd and pointless tasks: stroking decayed plants in a peat bog, measuring the sea with test-tubes and buckets and the ground with pieces of string-the physical traces of mourning.
Repetition evokes the ceaseless journeying and yearning which some psychologists identify as intrinsic to the bereavement process. The sensorimotor, haptic elements of her performances correspond to metaphors for wayfinding and mapping; feeling literally, the ground and one’s way through the darkness, wilderness and bewilderment of bereavement.
She is interested in journeying as a haptic, emotive terrain, a dynamic site of transit, connections and interrelationships. She explores also the metaphorical construction of memory through travel and it’s textual and visual narratives as expressed by Proust, Walter Benjamin and others. This inspires her direct, performative commitment to the long journeys which she has undertaken in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East.
Intrinsic to these futile tasks and journeying is an essential incompletion which is itself the mode of fulfilment. This stems from Kirwan’s interest in Friederich Schlegel’s concept of the philosophical fragment as a dynamic, creative practice of fragmentation for its own sake in which totality is both finite and plural at the same time.
Kirwan practised law as a barrister in Dublin and London for nearly twenty years before becoming an artist full time. She has a B.A. First Class Honours in Fine Art from the University for the Creative Arts Canterbury (2000), MA in Fine Art from the University of Middlesex (2002) and an MA in Aesthetics and Art Theory (2004) from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, London. She has taught fine art and historical and critical studies at a number of institutions including the University for the Creative Arts.
Her videos, video installations and performances have been shown in galleries, festivals and cinemas in many countries including the USA, Cuba, France, Turkey, Germany, Switzerland, Portugal, India, UK and during the 55th, 56th and 57th Venice Biennales. She has undertaken artist residencies in Berlin and at KASK, University College Ghent. During 2019 she will be artist in residence in Iceland and Ireland.
For more information visit artists’ web page.
During the difficult times we find ourselves in, with the pandemic and lockdowns, our artist in residence decided to broadcast the performances she will be making online and live for the global audience to be able to join in. The video below is an invitation to join the project live. For more information visit project site.