Artlink’s artist-in-residence throughout October, Emily McFarland, uses video and installation to reflect on the construction of shared cultural narratives and identity in cinema, television and visual culture. Often through citing a referent – borrowing from an assemblage of film clips, imagery and cultural artefacts – she re-stages structures and narratives in order to examine and re-appropriate articulations of cultural authority and representation. Emily is interested in renegotiating ideological structures of cinema using methods associated with the cut-up as a tool to recode cinematic conventions. Most recently, incorporating text, video and spatial interventions, the work is often generated from one or two significant reference points – films, plays and cultural ephemera, which is revisited and translated through an editing process. The aesthetic and political qualities of these sources are used a framework to trace or unravel particular histories, identities, communities and stories.
During the residency Emily developed a new 16mm film loosely based on Translations, a three-act play by Irish playwright Brian Friel. Located in BaileBeag, a fictional village in Co. Donegal, the play is set in the year 1833, a time marked by the beginning of more active intervention into Ireland by Britain. The play focuses on themes of language issues, post- colonialism, identity and culture which play out in the isolated community and hedge school in rural Co.Donegal. In spite of the rural isolation, tales of Greek goddesses are as common as the local oral histories and in addition to Irish, Latin and Greek are spoken in the local hedge schools too. Translations uses language as a tool to explore the inherent problems of communication and narratives which are lost and potentially gained in each act of name place translation, including lingual, cultural and generational, and is a starting point for the new work
Emily McFarland is an artist working in Belfast and Glasgow. She studied at The National College of Art and Design (IRL) before completing an MFA at The Glasgow School of Art. She is currently a recipient of the Freelands Artist Programme at PS2, and a previous recipient of the major Arts Council of Northern Ireland ACES Award (2017-18) in partnership with LUX and Artist Moving Image Northern Ireland; Culture Ireland Fund (2016 & 2017) and was awarded the Creative LAB residency at The Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow (2018), and Digital Art Studios Residency, Belfast (2015). She is a co-founder of Soft Fiction Projects, an artist-run organisation devoted to producing digital and printed matter, providing a platform for new artworks, collaborations, writing and exhibitions, and is a former co-director of Catalyst Arts Gallery, Belfast
- October 19, 2019
