On January 14 we celebrated the digital exhibition opening of Woven Network Nordics project!
Our four international artists [Brynhild Bye-Tiller (NO), Emma Hirsk (SE/IE), Dina Abu Hamdan (DK/JO) and Katarzyna Piórek (SE/PL)] presented their work which is focused on the COVID-19 pandemic affecting the role of women and women artists, using digital tools and socially engaged approaches.
Emma Hirsk works with the theme of grief cartography. How do we experience grief and trauma within the context of the pandemic? Her research touches the time, the distance, the memories, the geography in a personal way but also globally during the pandemic.
‘The Grief Cartographies’ is a long-term processual body of work that considers the acute intimacies of both private and collective loss, trauma and grief, within the context of a global Covid pandemic. As an artist-researcher from Northern Ireland, based in Sweden, this project is borne from the deeply private loss of my mother earlier this year, and contextualised against the backdrop of pandemic restrictions across travel, borders, contact, care, family, illness and death. Incorporating the series’ “Sculptures for my Mother” and more recent photographic works, “Can you See/ Are you There?” this residency research maps a path of grief cloven by time, touch, distance, identities, memories, geographies, and covid restrictions, and presents photographs, performances, films, drawings/writings, maps, and socio-spatial practices as a way through grief, and to somehow keep a connection to, and remembrance of my mother.
Emma Hirsk is an international interdisciplinary visual artist from Northern Ireland based in Sweden. Emma’s work repositions sculpture as socio-spatial practice, incorporating encounter, performativity, publicness, photography, materiality and ecology to inform the fundamental relationship we share with our human bodies.Emma holds an undergraduate degree in Jewellery and Metalwork from Dundee University, a MA in Fine Art from Northumbria University, and a postgraduate degree in Art Education from Liverpool John Moores. She has exhibited internationally across the USA, UK and Europe. www.emmahirsk.com