Representing The Past In The Here And Now

About The Event

Mairéad McClean will be joined by visual artist Jan McCullough and curator Ciara Hickey for a special seminar and book launch, featuring a discussion of how archives can be used in artistic practice, linking both HERE and McCullough's recent 'To Make a Monument' project at Queen's University Belfast. Also covered will be the themes behind both HERE and McClean's broader practice, as well as an examination of how visual art can represent the past. The discussion will be chaired by Belfast-based curator Ciara Hickey.

The new work made for HERE comments on the tension and anxiety felt by those living in Northern Ireland in the 1970s during ‘an explosive period of conflict and political unrest'. A time when the pressures of danger and threat - both invisible and visible - permeated everyday life. McClean’s work unfolds the complexity of this experience through her memories of how she understood the place she was growing up in

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About the Artist

Visual artist Mairéad McClean works across film, video, sound and photography using material from a diverse range of sources. Found footage, historical and family archives, filmed performances and televisual media, appear in many of her single screen films and multi-media installations produced over the past 25 years. Her work often features ordinary people as they cope with forms of control. Whether the camera follows actual events or follows enactments by a performer, people are seen to challenge or circumvent authority or to improvise with their own actions. Memory, and how and why we remember has been explored in much of her work.

McClean has received several awards for her work and was selected as a Decade of Centenary Artist in Residence working with Beyond 22 Virtual Archive Project at Trinity Longroom Hub, Dublin 2021/22. She was commissioned by the Wapping Project, London in 2018, The National Museums of Ireland 2015 and her video work No More (2013), exploring questions around the introduction of internment without trial in Northern Ireland in 1971, won the inaugural MAC International Art Prize in 2014. No More was acquired for the National Collection of Ireland at The Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2017.