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Member Profile
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | November – December 2021
Joy Gerrard, ‘Pracarious Freedom: Crowds, Flag, Barriers’, installation view, Festival Gallery; photograph by by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist, Highlanes Gallery and Galway International Arts Festival.
Brendan Maher: You often take a ‘God’s-eye view’ of your subject, utilising satellite or drone imagery of the protests you paint. Do your images look at these marches as human movement through space, in the physical sense, or do you wish to comment on the issues inherent to the protest?
Testing/testing BRENDAN MAHER SPEAKS WITH JOY GERRARD ABOUT HER CURRENT AND FORTHCOMING EXHIBITIONS.
Joy Gerrard: For about 25 years, I’ve made work that’s about architecture and how people use architecture in different ways, so I do have interest in that, but I am more interested in the protest itself. The majority of the work deals with marches related to women’s rights and women’s safety. Some work in ‘Precarious Freedom’ for example, deals with a vigil for Sarah Everard; another with a march for abortion rights in Poland. But it crosses over between concept and aesthetics. There are a whole set of decisions made in relation to making the image work – like where the buildings are and how the crowd is contained. I use images that we receive through news media and social media feeds and these images often tend to wash over us. The whole point of a protest is to draw attention to an issue: a violence, a death, a wrong. People are trying to change something. Most of us won’t be at the protest, so what do we think when we look at these events which are quite distant to us? I’m remaking images of events in order to question the viewer’s subjective response to the core issue. The work is not a generalised response to protest; I have to be driven by the subject of the protest to make a piece about it. BM: Your work is almost exclusively rendered in black and white. Why this choice? JG: There’s a few layers to this. I trained as a painter originally through the Crawford College of Art & Design and then as a printmaker in NCAD and the Royal College of Art and I also worked in the Graphic Studio. So
