Jennifer Mehigan uses the space of Gallery 2 in its multiplicity, bringing forth ideas of fields, graveyards, historical landscape painting and fantasy. Nightbloom Chokehold explores flatness, alluding to surveillance, the screen as frame and persistent image economies. Through the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), 3D software and poetry, she has created sculptures and digital paintings that occupy the gallery space and explore the limitations of the digital realm focusing on how it misunderstands and misrepresents queerness and femininity.

Based on ongoing research into women post-Famine who rendered themselves invisible and unknowable, Nightbloom Chokehold juxtaposes legible images (familiar flying horses and AI-generated family portraits) in sculptural form alongside illegible images created by inserting poetry and perfume descriptions into text-to-image generators. Cross-pollinating ideas of femininity and the economy of contemporary images results in feral or surreal arrangements that lean on erotically charged scenes that illustrate an array of power dynamics.

Mehigan’s mining the digital realm and the use of existing archives results in strange visual patterns that unfurl and simultaneously restrict.  Default software interfaces, the pervasiveness of ‘supremacy culture,’ and materials from agricultural fields rub up against the assumptions and mistranslations of AI’s visual cortex, cultivating intimacy between women, animals, plants, and the senses.

Jennifer Mehigan is an artist and researcher. Initially trained in graphic design, her work spans multiple disciplines, merging 3D modelling, sculpture, film-making, painting, scent, text, parties, floristry and flower farming. Mehigan regularly creates work in collaboration with Bassam Al-Sabah. Recent exhibitions include: Speech Sounds, curated by Iarlaith Ni Fhearois, VISUAL, Carlow (2022); Creamatorium 2, Transmediale, Silent Green, Berlin (2021); Creamatorium, PSSquared, Belfast (2020). She is based between Limerick and Belfast.

Jennifer Mehigan would like to thank collaborator and poet Mai Ivfjäll for their contribution in the making of this work. Further info on Ivfjäll here: weephole.com