Jaki Irvine works with video installation, photography, music composition and writing. Her immersive video and sound installations tell stories through fragmented, elliptical and open-ended narratives informed by rigorous research. Irvine picks out evocative details from the landscape or cityscape, in particular honing in on Dublin and Mexico City, two cities that have shaped and informed her practice. Contested histories, sonic bricolage, the built environment, and the customs and communities of a city's residents have all found their way into Irving's deep-reaching and polyphonic work: songs that filter through a city's streets, overheard conversations, the flap of a hummingbird's wings are given equal gravitas. Her attention is often turned to the peripheral or the undervalued: recentring stories or figures written out of history, particularly female figures, or presenting an alternative approach to the present, making space for strangeness. Humans and nature become intertwined in her imaginative worldview, with plants, birds and creatures permeating her practice, and adding to the sense of the unknown and unknowable, and blurring the boundary between the real and the imagined.
Read MoreSelected solo exhibitions include: The Bower Gallery (2021); Ack Ro', Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, (2020); If the Ground Should Open..., Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, (2016–2017); City of Women, The LAB, Dublin, (2010); Seven Folds in Time, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (2009); In a World Like This, The Model, Sligo, (2006), travelling to Chisenhale Gallery, London (2007); The Silver Bridge, SMART, Amsterdam (2006); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2005); Nightingale, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, (2005 &1999); Plans for forgotten works, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, (2005); Ivana's Answers, Delfina Project Space, London, (2001); "Fledermaus she said....",Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden, Germany, (1998) and Eyelashes, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, (1996). In 1997, Irvine represented Ireland in the Venice Biennale.
Text courtesy Kerlin Gallery.
