Carpet for the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2009. Research image at Dublin Castle, c.1970.
Sarah Browne is an artist based in Ireland. Her practice includes exhibitions, public projects, publishing and critical writing, and she also works collaboratively with Gareth Kennedy as Kennedy Browne. Browne has participated in residencies and artist exchanges in Finland, Thailand, Japan and the UK. In 2006 she was awarded the apexart international residency in New York and in 2009 she co-represented Ireland at the 53rd Venice Biennale.
Sarah Browne’s practice implicitly addresses ‘the economy’ as the dominant metaphor for contemporary social and political relations. She is concerned with the creation or documentation of intentional economies and temporary ‘communities’, typically small-scale systems influenced by emotional affects. Browne is interested in forms of non-market exchange such as gift economies, subsistence, subsidies and poaching. She often works on a domestic scale, using craft-based technologies such as knitting, flower-pressing, letter-writing, carpet-knotting and film-making as means of mapping and enacting these social relations. The work is often carried out with the participation of a ‘community’ where it is based, or creates a fictional or temporary ‘community’ for itself.
