Ursula Burke is an Irish artist who grew up in the Republic of Ireland and later lived in post-conflict Northern Ireland. She uses this experience of living as part of two cultures as a starting point to develop a dynamic practice that reflects on aesthetics and ethics of different cultures. Her practice incorporates Porcelain Sculpture, Soft Sculpture, Embroidery Sculpture and Drawing, investigating identity politics of historical and colonial eras, from Tradition to Modernity. Burke's work explores precarity in the social realm, power relations in the political arena, inherited trauma and epigenetics and post-conflict histories relative to Northern Ireland.

 

Her work creates a conceptual bridge between antiquity and the contemporary, mining art historical tropes of representation and display. Mediated through craft - based processes re-configured in a fine art context, her approach destabilises conventions around traditional approaches to making by using unexpected juxtapositions of materials, processes and images with a desire that bends towards the surreal.