Louise Manifold

Ireland
Statement

Louise Manifold works conceptually with film, photography, sculpture and text. Fascinated by the power of stories and the creation of myth her multi disciplinary practice reflects upon the nature and expectation of narrative as a means to explore ideas on both the self and the body in relation to the other.
Her visually saturated work holds an aesthetics that is somewhere between curiosity cabinet and surrealist theatre:Referencing Russian formalism traditions on cinematic estrangement and theatricality, Manifold generates dreamlike scenarios that suggest a sense of disconnection from the lived world in favor of a private real.
The created realities that Manifold recounts often test credibility: incidents of delusion, perceptual phenomena, or points of emotional and psychological collapse, that suggest a crossing of conceptual boundaries to unite personal experience with universal subconscious impulse.
Underpinning this is a concern with the limits and potential of language to shape and fix our sense of the world, with a particular significance to the language of symptoms of psychosomatic experiences,irrational beliefs and phenomenon that blur the lines between fiction and reality.
One of the distinctive elements in her work is her engagement with found materials,Manifold is drawn to objects and collections that hold particular ideologies linked to Enlightenment Rationalism,using subtle intervention that act as a point in which to echo a return to the supernatural systems they preceded.

Collaboration with other disciplines has always been central to her creative process,storytellers,fiction writers and psychics have featured in her previous works, and is fascinated with overlaps between time based art,documentary and cinematic practice.
Through playing on these blurry perspectives, Manifold invites her audiences to renegotiate the boundaries where fact ends and fictions begins,to consider how we fabricate what we call reality.

Profile
GlogauAIR Project
CV Summary

Former artists