Joy Gerrard lives and works in Belfast. She graduated with a BA from NCAD, Dublin and an MA and MPhil from the Royal College of Art, London. Drawing on over a decade of image-making and research on themes of protest and urban space, Joy archives and painstakingly remakes media-borne crowd images.
Her subjects include Climate Change, Brexit, BLM protests and women’s equality. Gerrard’s crowds are often viewed from above in built environments, indicating media surveillance. The re-scaling of news images into painterly forms disrupts our understanding of their ephemerality, permitting a reflective, critical perspective on the excess of media representation. Gerrard treats built environments and public spaces as equal participants within the images: providing context, physical constraint, but also symbolic power.
In early 2020, Gerrard’s practice benefited from a residency at the CCI in Paris. The result was a new body of work culminating in her most recent exhibition, Precarious Freedom, at the Highlanes Gallery (2021) and touring to the Galway International Arts Festival and the Butler Gallery.
Other solo exhibitions include; Put it to the People’ at the Golden Thread Gallery (2020), Belfast, ‘supermarket‘ in Stockholm with Ormston House (2019) and shot crowd at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2017). Selected group exhibitons include: Neither an elegy nor a manifesto at the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast. Protest and Remembrance, Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, 2019, Making History, Vienna, 2019 and In a Dream You Saw A Way To Survive and You Were Full of Joy; Hayward Gallery Touring show (2016). Gerrard is represented by Cristea Roberts Gallery, London.