Sarah Browne explores the relationship between humans and animals in Cobh exhibition
Sarah Browne with Cathy Dunne
Most artists are accustomed to presenting their work in art galleries, but for Sarah Browne, her new exhibition at Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh is something of an anomaly.
“I often work in collaboration with a lot of other people,” she explains. “And for the past ten years or so, my projects have been site-specific works in public spaces — leisure centres, hospitals and courthouses — and not so much in galleries. So this is actually a little bit unusual for me. It's also been a while since I've had a solo show in Ireland.”
Browne is a graduate of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. Working in film, sculpture and performance, her achievements include solo exhibitions in Stockholm and Brisbane, and representing Ireland — along with Gareth Kennedy — at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009.
At the heart of Browne’s new project at Sirius is a 28-minute film that began with a colour photograph of the artist in her First Communion dress, posing with her father and her pet cow on the family farm in the Midlands. The cow, Buttercup, has given the project its title.
“It’s not a sentimental film,” says Browne. “It's not really trying to remember that particular cow, it's really just trying to approach this photograph anew, and with what you know as an adult, to look at it differently.”
Browne commissioned Sarah Hayden, a writer based in the UK, to produce a text to accompany the film. “It turned out she has quite similar photographs of herself as a child in a communion dress on a farm, so it's not really that remarkable an image. But what the film does is return to it again and again, and in doing so, it starts to pick up on some of its strangeness. It’s an intimate film, and the feedback I’ve had from people who’ve watched it has been very warm.”
Buttercup explores memory and grief, and the relationship between humans and animals, particularly in terms of animal husbandry. It touches also on the relationship between Browne and her father.
“My dad is not an artist,” she says. ”He’s a farmer. But I really feel I learned how to be an artist from being on the farm. My dad emigrated to the United States when he was young. But he returned. He really wanted to have a connection to the land and pursue a meaningful life in some way through being a farmer. And that pursuit of a meaningful life entails trying to make a living and wrangling with government departments for grants, very much in a way that an artist wants to have a meaningful life and also has to somehow make ends meet in a subsistence economy.
“So, yeah, I've thought about my dad a lot while making the film, but I’ve thought about that relationship between art and farming as well.”
Along with Hayden, Browne had a small number of collaborators on the project. She shot much of the footage with the experimental filmmaker Helena Gouveia Monteiro, and invited David Donahoe to compose the soundtrack. “I worked with David before we even began filming,” she says. “The soundtrack is made up of a combination of field recordings and an original composition.” She worked with Daniel Hughes on captioning the film, and with Elaine Lillian Joseph on the narration. The film is projected on two screens, alternating between captions and audio-descriptions.
“Captioning is typically used or intended for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and audio description for people who are blind or partially sighted. The idea with this project is that nobody has to ask for those accommodations. They're all available within the gallery, as a given.
“Audio description would usually happen in gaps where there is space in a soundtrack. So if you're watching , for example, and you've got the audio description turned on, it'll describe how a door closes, or how somebody leaves the room, or whatever. Elaine does both the voiceover and the audio description on this project. It's the same voice, but it's doing two different things.”
For her last major project, Echo’s Bones, Browne collaborated on making a film — responding to the works of Samuel Beckett — with a group of autistic young people in North County Dublin. Her interest in arts and disability evolved naturally from her practice as an artist, she says.
“A lot of my work would be thought of as socially engaged. But at a certain point, I really noticed that the ways in which I worked, and socially engaged projects worked, excluded a lot of people. The conventional art world might think of itself as being very socially progressive, but there's a lot of barriers to people participating in the art world, whether as artists or as visitors attending art events.
“So I've been curious about finding those people and working with them and seeing how those experiences of disability and divergence can be very instructive of how the world could be different.” Browne’s next project will also be in the area of arts and disability. “It's a commission for an academic research project based in the UK, called Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures. It involves roboticists and engineers and philosophers and designers working on these different ideas in different ways. And I've been commissioned as an artist to make a film in response to their work. So that film is exploring laughter and comedy and the relationship of laughter and disability.
“Hopefully, I'll be working with some people who use synthetic speech and assistive communication devices, and who are also comedians. It's called Laugh Track.”
- Sarah Browne, Buttercup runs at Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh until 29 June.
- Further information: siriusartscentre.ie
