Common Work assembles a series of videos, photographs, and sculptures, as well as a performance developed from Byrne’s nearly decade-long research in the Arctic. It unravels her fieldwork in this region into works that consider the history and present of this fragile territory, where global warming is accelerated more than anywhere else on earth. This precarity is visible in Byrne’s performance Walking in Ice (2022) where the artist paced on an isolated patch of sea ice in open water, pointing to the Arctic as a harbinger of profound ecological loss. In several works, Byrne traces humanity’s footprint on the Arctic—by resuscitating degraded film footage she found in a deserted Russian mining town; and by telling the story of an infamous early 19th-century mountain range discovery in the Arctic, which might just have been a superior mirage. Historical remnants—sculptures made from Arctic fossils and rocks (fused during a Second World War German bombing) and Victorian conversation chairs, referencing the contradictory colonial exploration and domestic policing of the body, anchor the exhibition.’

Extract from an Accompanying Text written by Kari Conte, Independent curator.

Elaine Byrne is an artist who works multimodally, primarily with video, sculpture and photography. Her research-based practice examines overlooked histories, historical texts and artworks as a platform to mobilize history as it relates to current political and social concerns. Recent exhibitions include The Pleasure Ground, Rathfarnham Castle, Dublin, group show (2022), Material stories, Galerie Michaela Stock, Vienna, group show (2022), Borders without ends, Slought, Philadelphia, solo show with invited artist (2022), Woman in the machine, VISUAL Carlow and Carlow Arts Festival, group show (2021), New Threads, Crawford Gallery of art, Cork, Ireland, group show (2021), RHA annual, Dublin, group show (2021).