Jennifer Mehigan
6 January to 10 February 2021
Location - Castletownshend

Jennifer Mehigan (Ireland/Singapore) is an artist, researcher, and grower based in Belfast. With a background in floristry and graphic design, her multi-disciplinary installations are grounded in a framework of painting, beginning as images that morph into text, sound, smell and taste. Mehigan regularly creates work in collaboration with Bassam Al-Sabah.

As a PhD student at University of Ulster, Jennifer’s current research explores the grave and the cemetery as a garden space in Ireland, contrasting it with colonial approaches to garden design in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. In this exploration of physical mourning spaces, suppressed queer Irish histories are merged with posthumanism and the supernatural. Guided by the necropastoral and the subterranean (where ‘death’ lives), “strange meetings” begin to happen between the artist, her friends, local mythologies, the soil, the archive, and the internet.

Her residency at West Cork Arts Centre will take place during the quieter growing months of the year, and will focus on St Barrahane's graveyard  in which Edith Somerville and Martin Ross are buried. Currently working between allotment sites, her studio, and her sister’s garden in Ahiohill, Jennifer’s research into Somerville and Ross and their methods of working together (both while alive and posthumously) examines alternative strategies for collaboration, where ‘consciousness’ is not necessary, and ‘virtual’ can begin to take on new meanings.

West Cork Arts Centre · In conversation with: Jennifer Mehigan

Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre's Artist Residency Programme is supported by the Arts Council and Cork County Council.