Exhibitions

An artist with an international reputation, Jaki Irvine has created a series of haunting works as a result of her Fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute. During this time she explored some of the least expected areas of the Institute’s archive.

Jaki Irvine’s work plays on the half-remembered, and is ideally suited to the archive’s history of time and place. Material recording the life and work of the sculptor Betty Rea (1903-1965) particularly caught Irvine’s attention, and led her to make ‘For all the lives we’ll never live’ which focuses on an intriguing photograph of one of the sculptor’s friends. Irvine effectively brings the archive - and all the possibilities which it documents - back to life. In another series of photographs, documenting an exhibition in post-war Moscow, Irvine seems almost to step into the gallery space as she looks at the viewers looking at the show.

Irvine entitled the series as a whole ‘Plans for Forgotten Works’ and completed it against the backdrops of Ilkley Moor and Rome. Using wistful imagery, combined with lyrical passages of classical music, Irvine gives her new film, as with all her work, the intense quality of a newly created memory.

Born in Dublin in 1966, Jaki Irvine has received wide critical acclaim. She has shown widely over the last ten years, and was included in group shows at, among others, Sonsbeek (1993), Louisiana (1996), the Kunsthalle Bern (1998) and at the Van Abbemuseum and Tate Britain (2000). In 1997 she represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale. The Institute has commissioned a publication to mark her exhibition here, which will include new essays by the artist, Victoria Worsley and Caoimh‘n Mac Giolla Léith.