Artist Joy Gerrard’s new exhibition, Precarious Freedom, now on at the Highlanes Gallery in Drogheda, explores her response to the public protests around Brexit and the murder of Sarah Everard.
What happens when democratic processes express and produce social division? How are the outcomes of democratic processes resisted and critiqued? How does protest make use of visual-cultural means to ‘make injury visible’? (Rebecca Solnit)
As a spectacle of resistance, public protest has a long history and is a powerful form of expression in a time of instant, ‘citizen enabled’ global media.
Drawing on over a decade of image-making and research on themes of protest and urban space, Irish artist Joy Gerrard archives and painstakingly remakes media-borne crowd images.
Her subjects include climate change, Brexit, BLM protests and women’s equalities. These crowds are re-imaged in large monochrome paintings and small complex drawings made with Japanese ink.
The exhibition is open to the public until 31st July 2021. For more information go to www.highlanes.ie
