Irene Carruthers
Mud Drawings and Paintings
I have chosen to use non-conventional materials sourced directly from Anglesey. River muds, earth, clays and raw ochres - Materials with almost zero carbon footprint.
My current body of work is based on the riverine megalithic landscape surrounding Bryn Celli Du burial chamber in Eastern Anglesey where I made a seven day residency.
I have worked solely from sketchbooks and notes compiled during the residency - in a building through whose portal light has pierced for some five thousand years or more.
I am humbled.
My work explores the subject of identity, persecution and displacement, which may have been taken from a specific historical event or situation, and used as my point of departure.
This starts as an experience that I put myself into and I become emotionally involved in the work. The ideas dictate what materials or media I use.
Artists who have influenced my work are conceptual artists Doris Salcedo and Christian Boltanski whose work also explores the subject of identity, loss and displacement.
My work is intended to act as a visual voice that I have given the victims, to tell their own story, and a horrifying reminder of what happened to them.
At the beginning of November Bangor Greadigol left the Dr China Shop to make way for a christmas calendar shop: the calendar shop closed and made way for a foot spa, complete with fish....so we are currently homeless, or, as we prefer to call it, "free floating". Watch the empty spaces in Bangor, we could pop up anywhere.......
