Northern Ireland
Browse ArchiveArtist of the Month June 2019 – Catherine Minford
Monday 3rd June 2019 at 9am
Image: Antisocial Media - Polymer clay and reclaimed wooden box
Catherine Minford lives in Belfast and studied life drawing in both Belfast and Boston. She works as a creative writer in a design agency and in describing her sculptural practice she states that “In that world I use words to tell stories, and in this one, I use clay.”
Antisocial Media was created for the Royal Ulster Academy, and exhibited at their 2018 annual exhibition. It represents the artist’s conflict between, on the one hand, her repulsion in how social media is used to distribute fake news and unchecked propaganda and, on the other hand, the guilt that she feels in not participating and sharing in the lives of her friends through that medium. In tribute to them Catherine asked each of her close friends to send her a video of their face and head, and used that footage to complete a portrait of them. The portraits are anonymous. Only the artist knows who they are, and each one rests in its own safe place, protected inside the wooden box. They are her ‘likes’.
More objects from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s collection can be viewed online at www.artscouncil-ni.org/artwork/imu