Curatorial Perspectives

The following statements have been excerpted from the '(UN)EARTHED: through air, tied to each other' MFA 2026 Burren College of Art exhibition catalogue and opening night presentations:

Aideen Barry, Guest Curator:

Karen St Pierre’s installation returns memory to its unstable place—not as a fixed archive to be recovered whole, but as a provisional, mutable process. Like Mendieta’s earth imprints, which were both presence and absence, St Pierre’s spatial explorations confront memory’s vulnerability to erasure, distortion, and reconfiguration. This approach destabilises dominant narratives that seek coherence and closure, instead embracing multiplicity and fracture—spaces liminal and generative, between visibility and disappearance. Through this, the artist invites us to inhabit a world where histories resist neat categorisation and where remembering is an ongoing, performative act.

Dr Ruby Wallis, Burren College of Art, opening night presentation:

In Karen’s work, Surrealism, particularly that of female surrealists, informs an immersive installation that draws on feminist discourse, domestic labour, and the experience of caring for an elderly parent with dementia. Stemming from her photography-based collage practice, large immersive banners are arranged in a maze-like configuration, inviting us to move between them as images appear and blur through the translucent layers, revealing ruptures and slips in perception and memory, echoing the instability of recall.

Karen’s installation is sensory and haptic. Viewers move around suspended banners, encountering them as delicate, shifting forms. Moon-like landscape forms and dream logic allow bodies and objects to shift between states. The immersive scale draws us inward to the cave—toward the depths of the psyche and the terrain of dreams. Images of sculpted eyeballs stare out, a pair of conjoined hands, reminiscent of Man Ray's experimental photographs; fragments dissolve and disperse, just out of reach.

Dean Conor McGrady, Burren College of Art:

Dreamlike imagery proliferates in the work of Karen St. Pierre. Her large-scale installation addresses the fragility of memory and the loss of self. Undulating folds of fabric evoke a lucid visual language punctuated by gaps, dissolution and collapse. The free floating images that drift through the work suggest the richness and power of the imaginative, that while consciousness may be vulnerable to decline through age and illness it remains saturated with the pulse of life.

Exhibition Statement:

St Pierre’s work engages with memory as something fragile, accumulative, and disruptible. Her spatial installations ask us to imagine the material presence of memory, and, rather than telling us, St. Pierre exposes how memory thins, distorts, and slips under pressure. Her work sits in the discomfort of multiple realities existing simultaneously. Fragments of images appear through ruptures in the surface, moments of partial legibility, and areas of near dissolution. Encounters of memory are not fixed images but something entirely more tangled and bound.