East West

This work is not “ about’ Civil War in what once was Yugoslavia, but it was provoked by it and it involves an element of personal experience. The pressures of a Childhood in Northern Ireland have led to particular horror of Civil War.

East West was part of a series of works included in a solo  touring exhibition, Behind Appearance, of 20 prints (etchings, screen prints and lithography) culminating in an extensive exhibition of additional paintings, prints and photographs at the Seagate Gallery Dundee in 1997. The exhibition included photographic documentation of several installations which exploited the use of multiple and unfixed viewpoints. The various printmaking techniques in the rest of the work were used in an attempt to continue and develop the work of installation by other means, for example a repeated image of the figure screen printed slightly larger than life-sized accross the back wall of the Seagate Gallery.

The tour included Kansas State University Gallery, Carbondale State University Gallery, South Eastern Louisianna University Gallery (New Orleans), Moorhead State University Gallery and finally The Seagate Gallery in Dundee.

The message within the work ‘East West’ alludes to the following:

In 1991, Yugoslavia began to break up along ethnic lines. When the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence in 1992 the region quickly became the central theater of fighting. The Serbs targeted Bosniak and Croatian civilians in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. The war in Bosnia claimed the lives of an estimated 100,000 people and displaced more than two million. The height of the killing took place in July 1995 when 8,000 Bosniaks were killed in what became known as the Srebrenica genocide, the largest massacre in Europe after the Holocaust

The materials of the work were Screen prints on latex with metal and rope. The work was first shown at Richard Demarco at the Edinburgh Festival, Demarco European Art Foundation (DEAF),St. Mary’s School, Edinburgh, August, 1994