Helen Killane
b.1971, Ireland
‘I love my work’, claims a male voice on the audiotape that accompanies portraits of streetsweepers photographed by Helen Killane. Another voice sighs that he cannot win because there is always new litter. The repeat is perceived both as a matter of pride and despair, thus connecting unlikely values. The unlikely connectivity comes across in the display: the three larger-than-life heads on one wall face the smaller-than-life full figures on the other. The two different scales forge an optical illusion that one set is higher than the other. Moving towards the window with the headphones, the viewer loses that illusion. On repeating, the illusion comes back and goes away, confirming and denying the nature of a repeat, like in the experience of a street-cleaner targeting some slippery construct of identity.
— Dr Slavka Sverakova, Honorary Research Fellow, University of Ulster MFA catalogue (University of Ulster, Belfast, 2002)
(Text: on the border of each other catalogue, 2003)
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