Interview with Miriam de Búrca

23/03/19

Interview with Miriam de Búrca

Protest and Remembrance
Miriam de Búrca | Joy Gerrard | Mary Griffiths | Barbara Walker
Alan Cristea Gallery, London

28 February – 30 March 2019

Through her work, Miriam de Búrca (b1972, Munich) seeks to draw attention to burial sites in Ireland known as cilliní, where, as recently as the 1980s, anyone deemed unworthy by the Catholic church of a burial in consecrated ground was laid to rest – or, rather, not to rest, since theology teaches that their unblessed souls remain for ever in limbo. These unfortunate and unknown strangers include stillborn or unbaptised babies, unmarried mothers, those who have taken their own lives, the mentally ill and excommunicates. The absence of headstones adds to the wilful desire to make people forget and to suppress this long chapter of Irish history. But De Búrca believes it should be remembered – those buried should be remembered – and, by making careful drawings of the plants growing on the graves and, in the process, paying absolute attention to detail, she seeks to pay back some of the attention that those buried have been denied. Having finished with the sods of earth in her studio, she then returns them to the graves, hoping further to show a sign of respect and return some of the lost dignity. 

Watch the interview here

Interview with Jodie Carey

04/07/17

Interview: Jodie Carey

Jodie Carey: Earthcasts 
Edel Assanti, London23 June – 11 August 2017

Jodie Carey is interested in ideas of ageing, memory, time passing and the shadowy boundary between forgetting and remembering, and her monumental sculptures and installations have been influenced by such genres as still life and vanitas. She originally studied textiles, before switching to fine art and attending Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art, and traces of her own path are evident in her painstaking and labour-intensive artworks. Since having her first baby in 2016, and returning to her studio three weeks later, she has moved away from her more decorative and ornamental earlier works and begun to strip back her work and make it more subtle.

Carey, whose works develop through the process of making, describes her art not as a job but as an extension of who she is. She prefers more traditional and “simpler” processes, such as carving, weaving and drawing directly on to walls, eschewing anything heavily fabricated. She juxtaposes materials and scale, questioning the nature of the monument and exploring how something transient and fragile might also be quite monumental in its own right.

Carey invited Studio International to her south London studio while she was making works for her new installation, Earthcasts, at Edel Assanti, London. Burying lengths of salvaged timber in the ground, she created rudimentary moulds, into which she then poured plaster. The resulting sculptures, which she worked into by hand, sometimes adding a lick of white paint or a shade of coloured pencil, are of a human-scale and could equally be age-worn human figures or gnarled tree trunks – again, the human and the natural is a juxtaposition Carey enjoys exploiting. There is a material roughness to her pieces, which she describes as “very physical objects”.

Watch this interview here