Kira O’Reilly is the latest in a long line of female practitioners to investigate issues surrounding representation of the body and gender via that most direct tool of the artist’s palette: performance art. Below she writes about the principle concerns of her practice, whilst also assessing suitable contexts for the mediation of such work.
My work centres on physical and cultural colonisation on a personal and political level.
Using sculpture and installation, much of my work deals with the reinterpretation and colonisation of space – both hidden and visible.
Court shoes, wedding hats, posh handbags and pearly-pink eyeshadow are among the day-to-day objects which have fascinated me since I was a teenager.
I am in Liverpool for six months. At the moment my studio in the Tate Liverpool contains some large items of gym equipment, a working lion’s-head fountain, a tea urn, several televisions and hundreds of lightbulbs.
The gradual loss of a sense of place (because we live for the most part nowadays in ‘in between’ or ‘virtual’ places), and the disorientation which arises as a consequence, are among the factors which have created an obsession within my work with topography, urban plans, and the printed word.
My drawings are based on the observations, or are extrapolations from objects such as ice pop wrappers, empty boxes of bangers, and pledges of love scrawled on bus seats.
I wanted to create a painting that resonated the sense of an echo, a rolling rhythm, a song without words, a version of creation.
My current installation work challenges what I believe to be one of the most mysoginistic and succesfull ad campaigns of the 90s – the Wonderbra advert.
Anya Gallaccio was at the forefront of the 90s generation of contemporary visual artists – exhibiting in galleries and museums around the world.
