artitudes

Irene Loughlin

S W A Y Installation
mixed media

The S W A Y installation describes the carriage* (corseted torso—also refers to historical modes of transportation)* of the female body through a felt ancestral and unrecorded history. The installation is part memorial and marks the female tradition of walking into the sea, drawing upon cultural and media images of women choosing the water when faced with no choice at all. Braided twine wraps itself around the complexity and physicality of the nature of hysteria imposed on the female body. The S W A Y installation is aligned with visceral memories of female ancestry through the exploration of liquid essence, submergence and the residue found on shore.

Irene Loughlin is an Irish-Canadian interdisciplinary artist who works with themes of reclamation, and the aesthetics and politics of regeneration. She explores the elemental and physiological aspects of the human body, evoking the metaphors contained in its essence. She investigates the nature of the persecution and resistance of women in both historical and contemporary landscapes through the use of narrative imagery and time-based performance. The visceral, erotic, and poetic nature of painting and writing and the mediums of performance art and video create the essential grounds upon which these images are transposed.

Irene Loughlin has studied at the Ontario College of Art and SFU. She has curated several exhibitions including the work of Mexican Political Prisoners at The Firehall Arts Centre and the Performance Art Series Echoes and Labyrinths: An Exploration of Culture, Identity and Hybridity at Gallery Gachet.

She is currently co-curating the upcoming series Fluid Sexuality with Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa, as part of the Vancouver Performance Art Biennale in October 2001. She can be reached at maeve9@lycos.com.

David Low