Sharon Irish

Research Affiliate, Art Historian and Author

Research Affiliate & Author

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Jeppe Hein art installation

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About

I am an art and architectural historian interested in ways to activate history and the arts in the present day, for a variety of people. I took the image above when I was a Fellow at the University of Bristol, where the mirrored 2009 work  “Follow Me” by Jeppe Hein was installed on the campus.

I am a Research Affiliate in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Recent research has focused on the London-based artist Stephen Willats. That book, Concerning Stephen Willats and the Social Function of Art, published by Bloomsbury in 2021, is now available in physical and e-book forms. 

Krannert Art Museum hosted a book release conversation with me on Tuesday, March 9, 2021, on zoom and posted to YouTube, with two faculty, Jorge Lucero and Lou Turner, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

 

More About Sharon

Concerning Stephen Willats

With the incomparable help of Mitchell Oliver, I made these three short videos in 2020-21, during the pandemic. Due to the restrictions, I used my family, my house and my neighborhood to communicate some of the key takeaways of my book project about the London-based artist Stephen Willats.

This video is a mini-biography of the artist.

This video explores key concepts from my book: cybernetics and social practice.

This video looks at the role of architecture in the work of Stephen Willats, introduces the planner and architect, Max Lock, and makes a guess about why Willats did not like my book.

Colorful mural

Stephen Willats and the Social Function of Art

Concerning Stephen Willats by Sharon Irish book coverMy book on Stephen Willats has been published by Bloomsbury Academic (February 2021). It pulls together key strands of his practice and threads them through histories of British cybernetics, experimental art, and urban design. For Willats, a cluster of concepts about control and feedback within living and machine systems (cybernetics) offered a new means to make art relevant. For decades, Willats has built relationships through art with people in tower blocks, underground clubs, middle-class enclaves, and warehouses on the Isle of Dogs, to investigate their current conditions and future possibilities. This book demonstrates the power of Willats’s multi-media art to catalyze communication among participants and to upend ideas about “audience” and “art.”

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Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between

Suzanne Lacy: Spaces BetweenThe central themes of my 2010 book are: using a scheme of networks to analyze Lacy’s multifaceted art; considering gendered, racialized bodies in terms of positionality and performance; and recognizing participation’s intertwining with reception.

Lacy has shown an enduring commitment to using art in public to inform people about issues of common concern to affect policy. I suggest that the “spaces between” in her art provide openings that might be transformative for selves that are permeable and multiple. Her international career has demonstrated the power, problems and possibilities of art between the spaces of our diverse lives, as she has attempted to create structures that might give shape to a non-sexist, multi-racial democracy.

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Mural of cartoon faces

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