The Precariat 

The RHA Gallery

Dublin

2018. 

 

   

These Porcelain Busts were created following a British School at Rome Fellowship in 2014. Created using Parian porcelain – a material that emulates marble after firing. These sculptures adopt visual tropes of the classical tradition which are concerned with concepts of the golden ration or the ideal in form.  

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Inspired by the Baroque period in art history in which marble sculptures relate emotion or are caught in flight as is the case in many Bernini sculptures, these porcelain busts can be seen weeping and reveal bruises or wounds on the surface of their skin. Rather than enshrine the heroic or powerful, they aim to capture the darker side of revolution and conflict, formalising violence caught at a moment in time. 

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My work explores abuses of power in many realms of the social and politicial in the West. Often, taking a Northern Ireland context as a critical point of departure from which to generalise my approach outwards to international concerns. Formally, my work reappropriates tropes deeply invested in the Classical 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-confict Northern Irish society. The Precariat brings together a suite of work that seeks to investigate the experience of insecurity, fast becoming a universal condition as we struggle to exist in an impoverished and incresingly unstable civil society, in which personal solutions are prescribed to global problems.