Ursula Burke - Siren, Artist Opening Talk

Siren is an expansive exhibition that incorporates sculpture, ceramics, textile works and mosaic sculpture. Greco-Roman inspired, surrealist soft sculpture take centre stage as Ursula Burke creates a major new monumental work with Grecian terracotta sculpture and mosaic work. These diverse investigations are born out of a context of precarity in the social realm and disillusionment in the political sphere.

Siren will open at Highlanes with a public talk between Ursula Burke and Crawford Art Gallery Curator, Dawn Wiliams on Saturday 27th April, 3pm. Conversation will be Sign Language Interpreted. Places for this free event can be booked on eventbrite.ie & highlanes.ie.

ABOUT

Ursula Burke works in a variety of media, including porcelain sculpture, embroidery and drawing. Much of her work deals with issues of representation and identity in contemporary Ireland, and she completed a practice-based PhD exploring these themes at the University of Ulster, Belfast, in 2011.

Her methodology often involves layering art historical references with the social and political. Recently much of her work has dealt with the psychosocial landscape of Northern Ireland following the Peace Process, exploring the unique slippages and schisms through which competing identities in the region are reproduced. She is also interested in abuses of power in many realms of the social and political in the West. Formally, her work appropriates tropes deeply invested in the Classical, and re-inserts them into the contemporary – her aim is to create a conceptual bridge between the Classical ‘ideal’ (in form/society) and post-conflict Northern Irish society. She often takes a Northern Irish context as a critical point of departure from which to generalise an approach to international concerns, like the Black Lives Matter campaign and the perceived success or failure of political enterprise.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Highlanes Gallery, 36 Saint Laurence Street, Drogheda, Ireland