Moira Burke

Tá Rionnt De Na Bláthanna Marbhe (some of the flowers are dead), 2024. Canvas, acrylic ink, screenprint, metal, stone, video.

By way of collage, screenprint, textiles, metalwork and video, I am developing a visual language around my Irish Australian diasporic experience. ‘Tá Rionnt De Na Bláthanna Marbhe’ has grown out of the psycho-geographic terrain of my grandmother’s homeland in County Mayo, Ireland, her experience as young unmarried woman/indentured labourer in a Mother and Baby Home and my father’s childhood in an Irish Catholic orphanage. This has brought into focus for me the connection between colonial, church and state brutalities in Ireland to the present-day complexities of intergenerational traumas. I bring into my work my ongoing fractured relationship with, and the sounds of, Gaeilge, the language I belong to, and which belongs to me, but from which I am distanced.