Miriam De Búrca (b. 1972)

Miriam de Búrca was born in Munich, Germany, in 1972. Her family moved to the west of Ireland when she was three years old. She studied Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art and the University of Ulster, Belfast and in 2010 completed a practice-based PhD at the University of Ulster. Earlier work engaged with her own experience of the persisting divisions in Northern Ireland. Her drawings document the wildlife and plants inhabiting the grounds of Crom Estate, a former Anglo-Irish estate in Northern Ireland where she lived, and accentuate the transformation of a place with a fractious history and the conscious effort it takes to recall and understand its past and present. 

Recent work focuses on the ancient burial sites in Ireland called cilliní which were used to bury unbaptised babies (until as recently as the 1980s) and many others considered 'unsuitable' for consecrated ground: unmarried mothers, the mentally ill, unknown strangers, disabled children (or 'changelings'), suicides, excommunicates were all laid to rest here, exiled to a state of eternal limbo. One way she responds to these strange spaces is to select samples of plant life that grow from these grounds, making detailed studies as a way of interrogating the land and the charge that it holds. Her drawings and experimental film and video-works have been exhibited internationally in London, New York, Montreal, Tel Aviv, Warsaw and Berlin. She has works in the collection of the University of Limerick; Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Belfast; and Queens University, Belfast.