Áine Crawford

Artist’s Statement

"I am a queer and neurodivergent, multi-disciplinary artist, currently specialising in drawing, sculpture, and performance. My practice explores moments in the everyday and mundane where the abject body is at a threshold, caught in jeopardy physically, mentally, or through sensory inputs.

A foundation of this practice is an interest in storytelling and worldbuilding, which I develop through drawings of “my ladies” existing within their void, liminal world that parallels our own. In the face of rapidly increasing femicide and domestic violence statistics in a post-conflict North of Ireland, my ladies act as narrators to explore how misogyny and surveillance directly impact female presenting bodies within the domestic sphere.

I consider how, within systems of injustice, there is a voyeuristic expectation for the ordinary person to silently observe or dismiss pain and suffering of others/self to benefit authoritative figures, especially within online algorithms. I am interested in positions of authority and the complexities involved in being a witness.

I investigate these ideologies using taxidermy and animal symbolism/motifs to explore female-animal relationships in terms of Aristotelian tradition, which places marginalised humans and non-humans together at the bottom of the patriarchal, anthropocentric hierarchy to justify cisgender, white, male domination and oppression."