A Study of Aideen Barry

Aideen Barry is a Cork-born Galway-based artist working in the mediums of performance, film, drawings and animation. Currently her work deals with "the Uncanny," and she creates films and performances that deal with investigations into optical illusions. She plays with the blur between what is imagined and what is perceived to be, in what Rosalind Krauss refers to as the “Optical Unconscious.” Anna McCarthy is a Master's student at NUIG, studying Arts Policy and Practice, and she has undertaken to explore the theme of "Gothic Suburbia" in Barry's work. Says McCarthy: "Gothic is a term that has become subject to many interpretations since the architectural inception of the 11th Century. It has evolved over the centuries bringing with it aspects born of the darker side of Romanticism, Symbolism and Surrealism as well as Gothic Novels and Horror Movies. Gothic has now become a word that is borrowed from a myriad subcultures including science fiction, punk music and Victoriana. In modern day Ireland the excesses of the Celtic Tiger, and its demise, has presented Barry with what we will call Suburban Gothic; where nothing is what it is perceived to be. In this suburban sprawl the fears of traditional Gothic have been replaced with a host of paranoid and sinister fixations that have become the norm of the Twenty First Century. The fear of the mysterious foreigner that was common in the Eighteenth Century Gothic Novel has now been replaced with a fear of the foreign neighbour. Advances in science and technology leaves the world vunerable to total extinction with military and medical warfare. Milestones of Twentieth Century politics such as Feminism, Gay-liberation and the European Convention of Human Rights now compromise what was once the suburban dream. Everywhere we look people are frantically buying up as much land and property as they can before the property boom explodes; and in the Suburban Gothic of Ireland all of this is carried out while maintaing a manicured and stylised façade. By studying a series of performances, animations, drawings and films by Aideen Barry this thesis will attempt to uncover the truth of what lies behind the closed doors of Ireland’s Gothic Suburbia."