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C103
Review
Ursula Burke: The Inheritance
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Ursula Burke, Christine and Ciarán,2002,
colour photograph; courtesy the artist
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The Inheritance is essentially
a show of three disciplines, which Ursula Burke uses to assert
her thoughts: photography, video and drawing. Her photographic
family portraits are composed in a style reminiscent of Gainsborough's
portraits of the 1700s. Similarly, her subjects are placed
on their 'estate', portrayed as representatives of their class.
But Burke's treatment of her sitters moves beyond the pomp
and class supremacy normally associated with this genre of
portraiture.
The video is divided into clips,
subtitled with text, which take the viewer through the artist's
parental home and their life, punctuated with the repeated
image of her own navel. She is the outcome of the origin,
so to speak.
Her drawings are delicately executed
in pencil, bound into a pocketsize book. Despite being the
subtlest of her works, it is nonetheless a sensitive piece,
which seems to express her concept most lucidly. It contains
rubbings of familiar wallpaper patterns, and tracings of her
sitters, with adjoining quotes such as "In this family, we
can see ghosts" and "He has my mouth."
A subject too suffocatingly close
for many of us, Burke confronts her experience of the predestination
of family inheritance. The risk is, one may very well find
that much of one's 'unique' identity can be neatly portioned
into a mixed assortment of genetics and inherited familial
idiosyncrasies. This self-fulfilling prophecy is both a claustrophobic
and comforting realisation to make.
Miriam de Búrca is
an artist living and working in Belfast.
Ursula Burke: The Inheritance,
Context Gallery, Derry, November/December 2002
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