Joy Gerrard | Precarious Freedom: Crowds, Flags, Barriers at Galway International Arts Festival

For Precarious Freedom, Gerrard is exhibiting a series of drawings made during 2020 and 2021 and two new large-scale installation works.

What happens when democratic processes express and produce social division? How are the outcomes of democratic processes resisted and critiqued? How does protest make use of visual–cultural means to ‘make injury visible’? As a spectacle of resistance, public protest has a long history and is a powerful form of expression in a time of instant, ‘citizen enabled’ global media.

Drawing on over a decade of image–making and research on themes of protest and urban space, Joy Gerrard archives and painstakingly remakes media–borne crowd images. Her subjects include climate change, Brexit, BLM protests and women’s equality. These crowds are re–imaged in large monochrome paintings and small complex drawings made with Japanese ink.

Curated by Aoife Ruane, Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda.

To visit Precarious Freedom book your ticket HERE (visiting time is limited to 45 minutes).