Claire Halpin

1997-1998, Masters in Art and Design [Painting] Grays School of Art, R.G.U, Aberdeen, Scotland.
1992-1996, Advanced Diploma in Fine Art [Painting], Dublin Institute of Technology.
1991-1992, Certificate in Art and Design, Colaiste Dhulaigh, Dublin.

My work explores themes and concepts around contested territories and histories through painting, video and installation. The current series of paintings developed over the last two years are responding to different sites of conflict and protest – from cultural wars, the Pandemic, storming of the Capitol, to the current war in Ukraine as well as the ongoing forgotten wars away from the media lens. The spectacle and theatrics of conflict and protest documented and recorded through paint. The works attempt to navigate the complexity of the contemporary theatre of war and cultural wars as battlefield moves to the battlespace of the online and livefeed of news, images and media. A steady stream of content, real, fake and created by whom for whom. The covert machinations of the perpetual war that is arms deals, mercenaries, remote surveillance programmes and drone warfare away from the lens of the media.

The paintings employ imagery from the media, surveillance, military history, maps, archaeology, early civilization, bible stories and from the canon of art history of Byzantine and Early Renaissance to weave together a narrative through painting. I am influenced by the complex compositions of space and time in Renaissance paintings allowing multiple narratives and timescales to co-exist in the same picture plane and use these compositional devices in my work. 

The themes in the work concern the perception and interpretation of images. - how the reading of images and their resonance is influenced by how they are created, depicted and the context in which they are viewed. I strive to create work that raises questions about how we choose to record history and the veracity of painting, photography, and the media in documenting future history.