This Hurts, Audrey Blue
New Irish Works series 2023-24
Launch 6pm Thu 2 February
Running 3-26 February
At The Library Project
Audrey Blue was the first exhibition of the New Irish Works series 2022, presenting contemporary photographic practices at The Library Project throughout 2023-24, with the support of Inspirational Arts and the Arts Council of Ireland.
‘This Hurts’ explores obsession, release and fantasy. Running in circles, building patterns, constructing itself into a wormhole of questions. Questions that ease Audrey Blue and questions that haunt her. Vulnerability and fragility expose themselves throughout the work, in the form of subtext and saturation while she tries to snatch fleeting moments before they’re gone, clinging to whatever brings release. Audrey fixates her anxiety ridden dreams and overwhelming memories creating colour saturated objects and tender moments splayed out for her to remember, to acknowledge and accept.
Audrey Blue is trying to understand why she desires to live through other things; masquerading herself as them through her photographs, bleeding her persona into theirs as they do onto her own. She fears she’ll spend a life time trying to become something else that she’ll never have gotten to know herself. Audrey fears that her art is just an unhealthy obsession put in place in for her to exploit her bad habits. As a young woman the tendency to obsess has been cemented into her being since she even consciously knew how to obsess at all.
Audrey documents queer youth through her interactions, stumbling around Northern Ireland, driven by a hazy aesthetic. She invites the viewer to submerge into a world of her bleared emotions. Using lo-fi techniques to create an unpolished form, colours glaze over dark backdrops and she immerse into a self-constructed personalised fantasy. As a young queer female artist, examining my own existence and the imprints she has made takes place continually throughout her work, as a lingering subconscious echo.
Though much of Audrey Blue’s work is personal, emotional and ties to inner issues, she cannot escape the climate, environment and identity that she exhibits and is influenced by. The decision to open up this extremely personal monologue, now shared with audiences is becoming a strange form of catharsis, creating and displaying outwardly the visual narrative of queer female sadness, mental illness and grievance from Northern Ireland is radical in itself.
Audrey Blue (b.1998) is an Irish fine artist from Derry, Northern Ireland. Currently living and creating in Belfast N.I. Her media include analogue photography, painting, printmaking and experimental practices in film, embroidery and textiles. Blue’s themes explore queerness, mortality and conflict with youth and anxiety through her current ongoing series titled ‘This Hurts’.
