Butler Gallery is very pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Ursula Burke as part of a Highlanes Gallery National Tour.

Siren is an expansive exhibition that incorporates ceramic sculpture, textile sculpture, tapestry and mosaic sculpture. Greco-Roman inspired, surrealist mosaic sculpture take centre stage framed by major new monumental tapestry work.

Having lived for over twenty years in post-conflict Belfast, during and after the peace process, Burke has developed a unique continuum of exploration between political and aesthetic inquiries into trauma, wounding, and repair in her diverse practice. Her work creates an open system of correspondence between antiquity and modernity, introducing a larger poetic and political frame around the dysfunctional relations of trauma and violence that have qualified the building of empires.

These diverse formal investigations are born out of an exploration of epigenetics*, especially within post-conflict contexts such as Northern Ireland. In 2004 a spate of teenage suicides happened quite rapidly and in succession in Ardoyne, North Belfast, an area which is known as a Republican stronghold. Seen through the lens of epigenetic science, is it possible that a predisposition of trauma and depression may be switched on genetically, and passed down from the parent to the child in sites of conflict? What would the implications of such research mean for post-colonial Ireland or sites further afield such as Israel and Palestine?

Burke deftly reels us in through her meticulous artistry and invention and asks probing questions of the viewer in the second iteration of this extraordinary body of work.

Ursula Burke is an Irish artist who grew up in the Republic of Ireland and later lived in post-conflict Northern Ireland and uses this experience of living as a part of two cultures as a starting point to develop a dynamic practice that reflects on aesthetics and ethics of different cultures. Her practice incorporates Porcelain Sculpture, Soft Sculpture, Embroidery Sculpture and Drawing, investigating identity politics of historical and colonial eras, from Tradition to Modernity. Burke’s work explores precarity in the social realm, power relations in the political arena and post-conflict histories relative to Northern Ireland. Her work creates a conceptual bridge between antiquity and the contemporary, mining art historical tropes of representation and display. Mediated through craft-based processes reconfigured in a fine art context, her approach destabilises conventions around traditional approaches to making by using unexpected juxtapositions of materials, processes and images with a desire that bends towards the surreal.

Ursula Burke’s work for Siren has been supported by an Arts Council of Ireland Project Award 2024. Siren has been developed through Burke’s ongoing collaboration with the Highlanes Gallery National Tour with partners Butler Gallery and Wexford Arts Centre.

www.ursulaburke.com

*Epigenetics is the study of how cells control gene activity without changing the DNA sequence.