How to Use Fool's Gold. Pyrite, perspex, safety pin, paperclip, bulldog clips, variable capacitor, plastic drainpipe, electrical wire, bakelite headphones (passive crystal radio set, earthed to the building’s lightning rod with aerial extending outside). Installation detail at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK.
Sarah Browne‘s research-based practice centres on the production, distribution and use of particular objects for different situations and locales. She uses the peculiar status of the art object, and its uncertain purpose, as a hinge to lever discussions about economy, value and politics. Flexible in form, the work invokes a variety of problematic documentary strategies, communicating the role of emotion and affect in the development of new forms of social imagination.
Recent exhibitions include How to Use Fool’s Gold, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2012); Second Burial at Le Blanc, Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2011); Minimalism and Applied II, Daimler Contemporary, Berlin, and Unto This Last, Raven Row, London (both 2010). In 2009 she co-represented Ireland at the 53rd Venice Biennale with Gareth Kennedy and Kennedy Browne. This year, she is working with the Ikon Youth Programme and Slow Boat on a new project, Scarcity Radio, to be presented online in a serial format during summer 2012. She is currently resident at Firestation Artist Studios, and lectures at IADT Dun Laoghaire and the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.
