Portraits of Irish Art in Practice

"This pioneering study offers rich insights into the visual and theatre arts landscape of Northern Ireland. Keating's disciplined and purposeful focus on Duffy, McClean, McFetridge and Burke illuminates the variousness of their art activism and political engagement, while also claiming space for the individual aesthetic and public responsibility that characterises this ground-breaking group."

• Eve Patten, Director, Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

"This book provides great insight into practices of four women, whose work has impacted the Irish cultural scene on both sides of the border. It offers alternative perspectives to traditional art history texts by taking cross cutting, interdisciplinary approaches to the analysis of their artistic practice."

• Marguerite Nugent, Director of Culture at CV Life Trust, Coventry, UK

This book mines the space where aesthetic expression meets lived experience for Rita Duffy, Mairéad McClean, Paula McFetridge and Ursula Burke. Portrait essays woven with photographs, document each artist's coming of age in Ireland and Northern Ireland, in the context of her emerging practice. As individuals, their work considers infringements on human rights, systemic violence, gender roles and the negotiation of figurative and literal borders and boundaries. Together, they interrogate conflict and emergence from conflict, locally and globally. Their critical work is threaded with hope, contextualized by past and present political fragmentation. Works considered include Rita Duffy's paintings, drawings and animation like Siege, The Emperor Has No Clothes and Anatomy of Hope; Mairéad McClean's films No More, Broadcast and Making Her Mark; Paula McFetridge's productions like convictions, staged at the Crumlin Road Courthouse, This is What We Sang, performed at the Belfast Synagogue and Belfast Quartered, A Love Story, a promenade through Belfast's LGBTQ+ underground; and Ursula Burke's sculptures like Bonfire, Blue Sphinx and Peach Caryatid, and embroidery like The Politicians Frieze.

Jennifer Keating is a Teaching Professor of English and the Writing in the Disciplines Specialist in the William S. Dietrich II Institute for Writing Excellence at the University of Pittsburgh, USA.

Auteur

Jennifer Keating is a Teaching Professor of English and the Writing in the Disciplines Specialist in the William S. Dietrich II Institute for Writing Excellence at the University of Pittsburgh, USA.