A FALSE DAWN

The Ulster Museum 

2020

Curated by Kim Mawhinney and Nora Hickey M'Sichili

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Ursula Burke’s work explores abuses of power in the social and political realms of the West. A Northern Irish context often serves as a critical point of departure, from which she generalises her approach, looking outwards to international concerns. Formally, her work appropriates tropes deeply invested in the Classical tradition, and re-inserts them in the contemporary, aiming to create a conceptual bridge between the Classical ‘ideal’ (in form/society) and the ‘reality’ of contemporary post-conflict Northern Irish society.

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Her most recent work - A False Dawn - brings together a suite of work that seeks to investigate the experience of insecurity. As we struggle to subsist in an impoverished and increasingly unstable civil society, in which personal solutions are prescribed to global problems, insecurity is fast becoming a universal condition. Whilst her work is born out of a context of contested spaces, identities and borders her work also looks outwards towards Brexit and Trump politics,

posing questions in relation to the success or failure of the political enterprise. The concept for new progressive politics to take shape, with many false dawns, is redolent in this body of work.