Sarah Browne
Sarah Browne is an artist based in Ireland. Her practice includes exhibitions, public projects, publishing and critical writing. She also collaborates with Gareth Kennedy as Kennedy Browne. Browne has participated in residencies and artist exchanges in Finland, Thailand, Japan and the UK. In 2006 she was awarded the apexart international residency in New York and in 2009 she co-represented Ireland at the 53rd Venice Biennale.
Browne's practice implicitly addresses 'the economy' as the dominant metaphor for contemporary social and political relations. She is concerned with the creation or documentation of intentional economies and temporary 'communities', typically small-scale systems influenced by emotional affects. Browne is interested in forms of non-market exchange such as gift economies, subsistence, subsidies and poaching. She often works on a domestic scale, using craft-based technologies such as knitting, flower-pressing, letter-writing, carpet-knotting and film-making as means of mapping and enacting these social relations. The work is often carried out with the participation of a 'community' where it is based, or creates a fictional or temporary 'community' for itself.
Sarah Browne, A Romantic Interlude, 2008. Sculpture and super 8 film on DVD
The term Lebensreform (Life Reform) originated in
Germany in the mid 1890s for attempts to renew the whole conduct of
life, especially in the spheres of nutrition, clothing, dwelling
and health. More particularly, you could notice movements…any kind
of attitude against established constrictions of society…the Life
Reform movements were certainly predecessors of today's "escapist"
constructions of identity, formed via lifestyle conceptions.
- Gertrud Prellwitz
Browne's research for the Rhyzom project, Lebensreform in Leitrim, is a publication project that investigates the contemporary legacy of recent migrations of people, particularly German, Dutch and Swiss people, to the north west of Ireland. Her process often derives techniques from documentary genres and ethnographic practices, working from the premise of 'critical proximity', and with this work she is particularly interested in how actual life practices in Leitrim exist in parallel to representations of the place - Heinrich Boll's Irish Journal; Lovely Leitrim tourist films; lifestyle journalism in The Irish Times.
Sarah Browne's research for the Rhyzom project has received support through an artist residency at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Ireland.
