The End of the Road (beginning of the sky)
Fiona Larkin’s new work for the exhibition End Of The Road (beginning of the sky) takes form in a series of experiential investigations that examine the nature of accidental history and fragmented stories.
The artist sets out from the local, incidental occurrance of Amelia Earhart’s having landed her airplane in Gallagher’s field just outside Derry City, out of fuel and lost. This body of work looks at the idea of this event as being something established as pivotal or ‘significant’ by a process of historicisation rather than an acknowledgment of the chance or even accidental nature of that event. History, in turn, is fugitive and allows itself to be written by a series of remembered experiential narratives, the re-telling of the “I was there”, where the significance of people, places and actions become both burdened and supported by partial documentations.
Each of Larkin’s works arises from looking for things lost or missing. In doing so they touch on the sense of allowing to be carried along, surrendering to the determination of significant chance elements: the wind and the kindness of strangers. Partial documentation and emblematic outputs function to support the idea of the artist as the determining element of production in the event and concurrently a narrator. The artist as an intervention becomes a connective tissue between the action, the material production and the spectators access to the story.
The work perhaps suggests that we are all bystanders in history, even Earhart, when we surrender ourselves to the elements of chance, significance and signification is a misnomer that must be mediated to produce meaning.
*All exhibitions and events prior to 2012 are credited to The Context Gallery, our former name.
Fiona Larkin is an artist working in a range of media, primarily video, action, drawing and more recently, Super 8. She was born in Dublin and received her BA from N.C.A.D. in 1998. She has lived and worked in Belfast since completing her MFA in the University of Ulster in 2004. Her work has been presented both locally and internationally at This Is Not A Shop, Dublin, Youkobo Art Space, Tokyo and OMAC, Belfast.
She has curated a number of projects as Travel Agents Projects in collaboration with Manchester based artist Jane Anderson. She is a studio holder at Flax Art and Chair of the Board at the Digital Art Studios and currently lectures at the University of Ulster, Belfast.
