Colette Brannigan - Artist's Statement
Historically mosaic has been marginalised as a purely decorative art-form, leaving its potential as an original artistic medium little explored. I hope my work can bring renewed interest to this versatile and expressive medium, revealing its compelling physicality.
My work is three-dimensional and wall-hung, based upon the use of various art and craft media and the creative re-use of banal, everyday objects from the domestic laundry and building trade. The combination of these manufactured objects with materials such as stained-glass, mosaic and embroidery to re-present some very problematical subject matter is intended to be both unexpected and provocative, giving these highly crafted objects a cold dose of social realism.
The themes in the work are linked to the taboos around fertility and abortion, at times turning the conception of children away from the expected female role to the more elusive responsibility of the male. It explores the intense emotions involved in familial relationships and procreation, focusing on real-life situations of family breakdown and domestic squalor, and exploring the subsequent social inequities and domestic pressures that parental absence can create.
This battle for realism in my work often flies in the face of our preconceived ideals of what we expect carefully crafted objects to provide, gracing our homes with their elegant notions of form follows function, instead these time-consuming mosaics and intricate embroideries are desecrated in the search for the ugly realities of contemporary life, asking unsettling questions about, for example, the legitimacy of a pregnancy surrounded by drug addiction; finding subtle and imaginative ways to probe whether motherhood is a God-given right to be supported at all costs by the State. Issues which are currently ducked by the Establishment are confronted head on in works such as If You Can’t Look After Your Kids Don’t Fucking ‘Ave ‘Em, where an ironing board takes on the form of a Gothic window. This is reinforced, when a stained-glass panel is inserted into its frame, and an image of a pylon is depicted in its leading, suddenly becoming able to suggest a secular source of omnipotent power. The free-standing stained-glass pylon is attached by cables to the navel of the foetus, which lies in a womb drawn onto a graffiti-covered white-tiled wall, which is itself being broken by a hammer.
The development of this idea is shown in more recent work such as Squatter, where a small embroidered figure, on the sleeve of a leather jacket is trapped behind the stained-glass panel of the pylon, the power lines have been etched into the metal plate, and all are held within the ironing board frame, leaving this bewildered, primal figure, in a life-threatening state of danger.
Colette Brannigan
May 2009