Graveyard Aesthetics

'Graveyard Aesthetics' is a contemporary art project uniting three international artists from Northern Ireland exploring the theme of mortality with a focus on memorials, mausolea, headstones and the cemetery landscape.

Gail Ritchie (1966-), Ciaran Magill (1978-) and Brendan Jamison (1979-) are receptive to the poetic beauty of burial sites and the human impulse to honour the dead.

Making sense of life through understanding and accepting our own inevitable death is a universal commonality that connects every human being on the planet.

Over the past 5 years, Ritchie, Magill and Jamison have independently researched some of the most significant graveyards in America and Europe, including Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris. For the first time, this exhibition will unite the different strands of their research and will present a fascinating insight into the visual manifestation of 'death's documentation'. The show will feature new drawings, paintings and sugar cube sculptures created in direct response to the cemetery construct.

'Graveyard Aesthetics' celebrates all aspects of the cemetery context from the traditional horror genre's projection of haunting isolation and spooky eeriness to contemporary enquiries on the visual language of memorials, history and documentation...love and loss, honour and pride, hopefulness and joy...

DECELERATION GRAPH (2012) Gail Ritchie

Photography with equations and graphs

(work-in-progress)

DISTANCE (2012) Gail Ritchie

Photography and equation

(work-in-progress)

ASH (2012) Gail Ritchie

Photography and equation

(work-in-progress)

GAIL RITCHIE RESEARCH:

Ongoing in Ritchie’s work is a study of memory and memorials. This has included research on the construction of war memorials of various kinds as well as an interrogation of national and family history. Her work explores the spaces between history and memory, where they overlap or merge to offer changing and contested understandings of the past in relation to conflict. Jay Winter refers to this type of work as being part of a ‘memory boom’ – a generational phenomena which seeks to commemorate or bear witness after war or political trauma and which can be made manifest by cultural means.

Having considered the aesthetics of state sponsored memorials and cemeteries, such as the Commonwealth War Graves in Northern France, Ritchie has begun to deconstruct these formal architectural tropes to develop ideas for alternative forms of memorials. As memory becomes a commodity marketed by museum and heritage sites, Ritchie considers other locations which can act as repositories for grief and mourning and which are personal and intimate spaces.

Ritchie has been working with an engineer to try to arrive at an equation which explains both the erosion of an island and the erosion of memory over time, and also bringing into this the volume of cremated remains, when dispersed over time and place come to nothing (tangible)!

"memory is framed by forgetting as the shoreline is to the waves"

by Marc Auge in Les formes de l'oubli, featured in a book edited by Jay Winter: The Shadows of War.

In a sense then, the images are a reflection on an Island on Strangford Lough which is a site of personal remembrance for the artist, in the absence of a traditional graveyard.

HEADSTONE (2012) Brendan Jamison,

carved sugar cubes, 43 x 29.5 x 5 cms

Studio research (detail) Brendan Jamison

PROJECT RESEARCH

America, England, France and Germany