Sarah Browne: Buttercup

Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, County Cork, Ireland, presents an exhibition by the Irish artist Sarah Browne featuring a newly created film, Buttercup, and a companion sculptural piece, Safelight. This is Browne’s first solo show in an Irish institution in a decade, and part of her long-form inquiry into the material culture of language, literacy, and confinement being carried out in conjunction with Sirius Arts Centre.

Browne examines spoken and unspoken bodily experiences of knowledge, labor, and justice. She engages with alternative and suppressed practices and narratives associated with marginalized personhoods, acting in solidarity with people excluded from or undermined by mainstream normative and value systems, whether legal, scientific, or political. Her practice involves film, publishing, and performance, and her works are presented in both museums and the public realm. She often works with people of formal and informal expertise (children, lawyers, poets) to establish a new community of knowledge or concern through art.

The film Buttercup is realized in collaboration with David Donohoe, Helena Gouveia Monteiro, Elaine Lillian Joseph, Daniel Hughes, and disabled consultants. The film is presented on two screens through a looped sequence alternating between captioned and audio-described versions, developed in dialogue with Joseph and Hughes. These differing sensory translations are accessible for all visitors.

The film consists of a voice-over attempting to describe and comprehend a childhood photograph, framed as a traditional family portrait. This photograph, which recurs throughout, depicts a girl wearing a Communion dress with her father and her pet cow, the eponymous Buttercup, at a farm. Other imagery takes in views of cattle and pasture at the site of the photograph, suggesting a rural scene, either bucolic or extractivist.

The film evolves through a narration in the style of a memoir, responding to the institutions of family and property implied by the photograph. The narrator approaches the photograph repeatedly, and through her ongoing rumination, unfolds entangled relationships of human and animal, agriculture and artmaking, mothering and domestication, care and violence. The farm can be viewed as a place of learning about society at large that involves implicit hierarchies, from gendered forms of labor to interactions with disability and the allocation of autonomy or freedom.

The footage includes still and slow-moving images, and was shot in 16mm and produced through cameraless animation on celluloid by Gouveia Monteiro and Browne. The score is produced by Donohoe, and combines field recordings from the farm with experimental drone and brass chords, generating alternating physical sensations of warmth and unease, and thus communicating in ways the narrator struggles to voice.

Safelight functions in the gallery simultaneously as a darkroom light, a barn light fixture, and a Sacred Heart, that last a domestic artifact of devotion in the Catholic tradition. Tucked discreetly behind it are a cattle ID tag and a Saint Brigid’s cross, used to protect animals in cowsheds. Thus, the sculpture syncretizes state/bureaucratic procedures of agriculture with animism, and attends to experiences of danger, perception, and exposure.

Browne uses “parallel play” as a neurodivergent method of collaboration, while refusing any pathological judgment devaluing such engagement. As part of this approach, she has invited writer Sarah Hayden to respond to the film. Hayden’s contribution, as if […] wearing anklesocks, forms a distinct text that is interdependent with the film, intended to be heard in the air or read on the page, and is showcased as a performance and a pamphlet accompanying the exhibition.

Buttercup is commissioned by Sirius Arts Centre and realized with funding from Arts & Disability Ireland through the Arts and Disability Connect scheme. The presentation of Buttercup is organized by Sirius Arts Centre and curated by Miguel Amado, director.

The publication of as if […] wearing anklesocks is supported by Kunstverein Aughrim, County Wicklow, Ireland.

Launch event
Sarah Browne, curator Kate Strain, from Kunstverein Aughrim, and Miguel Amado discuss the exhibition, the politics and aesthetics of display informing the film Buttercup, and Browne’s wider artistic and ethical concerns.

About the artist
Sarah Browne is an artist based in Cork, Ireland. Recent commissions, solo shows, and publications include Echo’s Bones and Echo’s Bones: a parallel play, Fingal County Council, Ireland (2022, 2023); Public feeling, South Dublin County Council (2019); and Report to an Academy, Marabouparken, Sundbyberg, Sweden (2017). Browne curated The Law is a White Dog, the 2020 edition of TULCA, Galway, Ireland. Browne’s work is part of the collections of the Arts Council of Ireland and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

About Sirius Arts Centre
Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, County Cork, Ireland, approaches art through the lens of society. It organizes focused, artist-driven projects and collaborative, community-oriented projects. It facilitates the production and presentation of, and public engagement with, art and knowledge, and offers professional development opportunities to artists through commissions and residencies. It operates across all art forms—visual, performing, live, film, sound, vocal, written, and born-digital—programming a mix of exhibitions, performances, events, activities, and publications both on-site and online.

Sirius Arts Centre’s operating capacity and programming are made possible with public funds from the Arts Council of Ireland and Cork County Council.