Biography
Natasha Bourke is a Cork-based artist and recent fine art graduate, with 1st class honours, from the Crawford College of Art and Design. Having previously trained in dance, circus and theatre, the artist has been involved in multiple solo & group performances, residencies, collectives, organizations & events in Ireland and overseas.
Natasha uses analogue & digital lens-based media, performance, sculpture, light, sound, drawing and Installation as languages in her practice. Gathering – whether visual, audio, text or trope - and experimental play (inside/outside of studio context) are core to the artist’s creative and critical process. The resourced, treated and collated materials are often connected to a notion of vanishing technologies or obsolescence. Environments are occasionally materialised from initial visualisation, adding bespoke soundscapes to intensify sensory experience; the space, when activated, enables the idea to morph and develop. The artist’s dance background tends to imply human and synthetic movement as well as a degree of theatricality in the work; considered existential themes of longing, loss and isolation tend to be rendered with a sense of irony, pathos and the absurd. The work contemplates notions of self and society such as perception, memory, myth, legacy, spectatorship, transience and the emerging self whilst harnessing a sense of dystopia and the sublime. Theoretically speaking historical, scientific, anthropological and phenomenological sources are drawn from to help put the work into a wider context. Natasha holds much value in collaborative processes as well as her own solo practice for its enrichment of exchange, stimulus and motivation.
