An Intimate Public

Tara McGinn pursues an interdisciplinary practice combining sculptural (re)production, image-based assemblage and reflective writing; developing studio processes and research that connect subjects of trauma, memory, identity, and space. Responding intuitively to media and embracing the malleability of forms, she interrogates the language of practical and digital materials, exploiting storytelling as a layering device. This approach transforms the visual language and meaning of the forms she examines, making them sites for cultural practices and political narratives to interact as playful fictions.

Her recent work since 2021 has revolved around the syntaxes and surfaces of her family home in Enniscorthy, where she is creating an ongoing body of multimedia work that attempts to give language to an internalised and lived experience. This work has given her the opportunity to embrace personal subjects of queer rurality, illness and care, domestic interiors, and intimacy, through the lens of objects and textures that populate and communicate stories of loss, pain, neglect, and memory.

In January 2023 she conducted a residency with PS², facilitated by curators-in-residence Cecelia Graham and Grace Jackson. Tara re-purposed the public space into a studio, responding to its architectural qualities by adapting her material-based approach to its structures, designs and shapes. This has accumulated into an expanded body of previous work with new additions cast directly from the PS² and finished in her studio at Flax on Bedford Street.

The (upcoming) exhibition An Intimate Public will be opening for Late Night Art on the 1^st of June and running until the 1^st of July. On the final night of the exhibition on the 30^th of June there will be a performance that is open for all to attend.

This project marks the fifth of Cecelia Graham and Grace Jackson’s curatorial residency at PS²

** Please note that there is health and safety advice for this exhibition: Members of the public with allergies to latex and similar rubbers are not advised to attend the exhibition or the performance.

About the artist

Tara McGinn is an interdisciplinary artist originally from Enniscorthy and is a former co-director at Catalyst Arts and studio member of Flax Studios in Belfast. Her work combines sculptural (re)production, image-based assemblage and writing. Her developing studio processes aim to connect, contrast and translate subjects of trauma, memory, identity and space. Recent exhibitions include Woman in the Machine at VISUAL Carlow, and her solo show Nothing Alien is Human to Us at Platform, Belfast. She was part of CCA's Window Texts 2021 series with Mincers, designed by Reece Kennedy.
Tara McGinn is part of the 4th cohort of artists 2022/23 in the Freelands Artist Programme.

About the curators

This is the third project as part of Cecelia Graham and Grace Jackson’s yearlong collaborative curatorial residency at PS². Throughout the residency, the duo have developed a mode of working that aims to challenge curatorial intentions that centre around strict outcomes. Instead, Cecelia and Grace have created a space for artists to test ideas or return to work considered unresolved. The projects below have been curated by the curatorial duo:

1.  Mark Buckeridge- Handycam Gifts
2. Bog Cottage
3. Tara McGinn- A Change in the Cells
4. Christopher Steenson- Let it run all over me
5. Tara McGinn- An Intimate Public
   
   

More information about the curatorial residency can be found here.

This project has been supported by Belfast City Council. PS² is supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland