Eileen O'Rourke makes beautifully intricate and delicately executed drawings. Whilst differing in the methods and materials used, the works presented for her MA degree show achieve harmony not just through the influence of the artist's earlier undergraduate degree in embroidery but by the visceral quality with which the works are charged.
For part one of her presentation, 'Untitled', human hairs collected and dyed into a variety of colours have been threaded through a series of 'canvases'. Made from sections of bed sheet, these canvases are stretched across five circular embroidery frames of differing sizes.
Installed linearly on the wall, each work presents a visually complex mass of tangled lines that snake across the surface, producing images reminiscent of topographical maps. Whilst one of the works in particular is certainly suggestive of a human head in profile, a conversation with the artist at the preview clarifies that this is unintentional against its grain.
By producing images that allude to the fabric of our interior landscape, O'Rourke's work makes us think about the body. Through her use of human hair, bed sheets and the ever present evidence of the piercing power of needles and pins, however, O'Rourke doesn't just make us think about the body, she physically implicates it as well.
