A text piece by Michelle Bourke-Girgis February/ March 2014
This piece needs to be read, viewed and understood from inside the Luas. It's intention is to speak about what is reaelly advertised: personal feelings of vulnerability. By doing so, Michelle hopes the 40 000 Luas passengers- of whom some might be feeling "down" will open up to their personal dilemma and be encouraged to speak about it.
The text is written in almost child like lettering onto a simple white 3m wide plywood, raised above the Art Tunnel fence line.
As part of the final exhibits (along with "Closure" in the Community Platform and "Reconstruction" in the Tunnel section- It also reflects the feeling of the Art Tunnelers. This site has been a training ground for Artists and Gardeners alike. The Art Tunnel itself has turned out "weak" and had to give up as the lease was not extended in March 2014 but it has proven that it can work. Reconstruction?
Michelle Bourke-Girgis is a multi media artist from Dublin who specialises in "performative sculpture".
She studied Fine Art in Central Saint Martins, London and during the last few years has punctuated her practise with moments of performance, which can be exploratory or momentum building in her art practise, also sometimes resulting in art pieces in their own right.
Working on sculpture and relief pieces in the studio she simultaneously realised that her main interest is in the sculpture doing the performance, whether it be mechatronic and moving, interactive due to being fitted with a viewer activated sound piece or simply performative because of its shapes and forms.
Audience participation is often key in the work and in Jan 2013 staged a live interactive multilingual web based piece across the time zones from Cairo to Dublin, exploring how information can be disguised depending on its delivery, be it in a foreign language and so on.
She is also very interested in hand painted text and the situation of work in the public realm, fertile ground for dissemination of ideas and sharing of culture outside of the white cube gallery space.
Since moving back to Dublin Michelle has begun to explore this, via methodical guerrilla pasting up of posters, gauche water-colour painting of abstract patterns on to walls in public places, (pictured) and most recently the hand-painted large scale text piece in the soon to be closed down Art Tunnel, Smithfield
Interested in dichotomies, the situation of being in two places at once, the balance of beauty and non-beauty, boldness and delicacy, humour and seriousness, sensitivity and strength are all inspirations in the work