URSULA BURKE
SIREN
2025
Curated by Aoife Ruane and Catherine Bowe
SIREN is part of a Highlanes Gallery National Tour with partners The Butler Gallery and Wexford Arts Centre.
Siren is an expansive exhibition that incorporates ceramic sculpture, textile sculpture, tapestry and mosaic sculpture. Greco-Roman inspired, surrealist mosaic sculpture take centre stage framed by major new monumental tapestry work.
Having lived for over twenty years in post-conflict Belfast, during and after the peace process, Burke has developed a unique continuum of exploration between political and aesthetic inquiries into trauma, wounding and repair in her practice. In form, her work creates an open system of correspondence between antiquity and modernity, introducing a larger poetic and political frame around the dysfunctional relations of trauma and violence that have qualified the building of empires across space and time.
These diverse formal investigations are born out of an exploration of epigenetics, especially within post-conflict contexts such at Northern Ireland. In 2004 a spate of teenage suicides happened quite rapidly and in succession in Ardoyne, North Belfast, an area which is known as a Republican stronghold – seen through the lens of epigenetic science is it possible that a predisposition of trauma and depression may be switched on genetically, and passed down from the parent to the child in sites of conflict? What would the implications of such research mean for post-colonial Ireland or sites further afield such as Israel and Palestine?