Engine Room Gallery Summer show opening 8th July

Engine Room Gallery Summer Show
08 – 31 July 2010
The Ebb and Flow of East Belfast
Bronagh Lawson
Opening on Thursday 8th July 2010 at 7pm.

As the artist-in-residence in a building on the peace line at the junction of the Newtownards Road and the Short Strand, artist Bronagh Lawson has interpreted the many changes happening in this notorious cross-community area in the form of broadsheet inspired prints, called “The Ebb and Flow of East Belfast”. One of these will be shown in the Engine Room Gallery summer exhibition this month.
Bronagh went to the newsagents on both sides of the peace line once every three months over the past year and purchased all the newspapers that inform the two local communities. Random text and images were torn from the newspapers: headlines, local grievances, some extreme, some personal. These fragments, echoing the historical broadsheet, were then intuitively used as Chine Collé on an etching plate, as a limited varied edition of 10.
The term ‘Broadsheet’ derives from types of popular prints hundred years ago, usually just of a single sheet, sold on the streets and containing various types of material, from ballads to political satire. First published in 1618, they would talk about the life and energy of a specific place.
‘Chine Collé’, translated as Chinese collage, is a technique the Chinese invented for bringing areas of colour into a print. The printmaker collages while printing, using a special rice paste to keep the fragments in place.
Bronagh says about her new artwork: “Nothing exists independent of its own surroundings, including language. Newspapers in Northern Ireland inform the population of events, feeding stereotypes and slanting news to different political persuasions. The chosen texts totally change the feel of each varied edition, just like one’s view of the world is rightly or wrongly changed or confirmed depending on what newspaper one reads.”