Bio
Born 1970 in Hokitika, New Zealand. Lives and works in Wellington, New Zealand.
Irene Ferguson's interest lies within the tradition of portraiture and art history. Her work, often surreal and unsettling, possesses a dry and witty reinvigoration of contemporary painting practice. Particularly concerned with the dynamic between subject, viewer and artist, her work plays with the blur between figure and portrait and explores the act of looking and how it effects how we view a figure.
Painted from photographs, none of the people in Ferguson's latest pictures claim to be exactly what they appear; instead they don costumes, adopt poses, or question the authority of images on screen. Ferguson presents these figures as play-actors, or as spectators lit by the screen, suggesting each is as real as the other. The characters (and ‘characters' they always are in Ferguson's work; there is always a theatrical aspect, no one playing with quite a straight face) all wear costumes, some in casually playful dress-up and some as animals mimicking human traits. [...]In this body of recent work, there is a distinct change in Ferguson's work. This has always been technically accomplished; in recent years it has been strongly influenced by traditions of portrait painting, and executed with a sense of theatre, or grotesque surrealism. In ‘Electric Water' the theatrical elements take centre stage. These are shown alongside images addressing an audience's encounter with the cinematic screen - as an experience which is at once visual, psychological and physical. Immersed in light, the Screen group seem transfixed not only by what they see, but almost by a material substance, bound by the light as if it is honey or glue. In Ferguson's work the simple portrait has been replaced by its more complex cousins, images of what it looks like to watch, to be caught in observation.
Abby Cunnane (Electric Water, exhibition text).
Irene studied at the Otago School of Fine Art, New York Academy of Fine Art and Charles H. Cecil Studio, Florence. Winner of the 2008 New Zealand Portrait Gallery/Adam Portraiture Award, Irene was also awarded the William Hodges Fellowship in 2002.