The art of the protest

A SOLO exhibition by Joy Gerrard under the title Fractured Crowd will be shown in the upper and lower galleries at Wexford Arts Centre throughout the Opera Festival.

The body of work by Gerrard will open on Sunday (October 21) and continue for three weeks after the Festival until Saturday, November 24.

Born in Ireland in 1971, Gerrard has been living and working between London and Belfast in recent years, creating work in response to social and political interactions, movements and expressions worldwide.

Having studied in London, Dublin and Cork, her wealth of knowledge in research, printmaking and fine art painting continues to emerge from her work and and is evident in her extensive history of exhibitions, residencies, commissions, lectures, presentations, awards and collections in which her work is included.

Her current work examines and concentrates on crowds, specifically protest crowds; their effect on political outcomes and social segregation and the systems by which they relate to their surroundings, in particular.

Gerrard has taken familiar media-based imagery and recreated the perspective of these scenes, creating a new level of importance through the retelling of historical events and resulting in the production of paintings and drawings in pen and ink, including large scale drawings.