Kate Byrne

b. 1958, Ireland

The recent photographic series resulted from continual negotiating with symbolism and imagery from Jan van Eyck’s 1434 Arnolfini double-portrait. While a multiplicity of interpretation is intended within the images, they attempt to question the instability of sexual boundaries and the split or rupture between the appearance of a symbol and the meaning behind it.

Although present in the images, the egg is isolated and removed from the body, disconnected from its normal context, whether mundane domestic or creative womb, giving it undue attention and, through the employment of unfamiliar angles or viewing positions, obliging the viewer to focus compulsively upon it. A degree of oscillation between the masculine and feminine is played upon through movement and pose that is given more prominence on the reflected surface than in reality, with the bizarre reinforced by the images being turned on their heads. The photographs attempt to dramatise the process of the displaced egg yolk’s transition to almost indefinable substance under the feet, supplanting the pleasure of voyeurism onto a terrain of questioning and disquiet. The egg is no longer associated with an idealised feminine sexuality, as its destruction masks its inherent femininity and simultaneously disrupts any comfortable conditions of spectatorship.

(Text: heroes + holies catalogue, 2002)