Residency awarded at UCD College of Social Sciences and Law

Sarah Browne is one of seven artists awarded a residency in 2017 with UCD Parity Studios, a university-wide programme connecting the rich ecology of art practice in Ireland with research and education at University College Dublin.

Through the Artist in Residence Programme, Elective modules and Public Engagement Programme, Parity Studios supports critical thinking and creative approaches to cross-disciplinary research, pedagogy and communication. Artist studios, based in converted laboratories in UCD School of Physics, provide a bright working hub and supportive environment for this unique community of artists at University College Dublin.

Supported by UCD Colleges of Science, Social Sciences and Law, Arts and Humanities, Engineering & Architecture and College of Business artists are offered an artist’s fee, 24 hour access to artist studios , access to UCD academics researchers and students, talks lectures and symposia and UCD libraries. The mission of Parity Studios is to create a dynamic network of professional artists, academics, researchers and students, working at the intersections of their disciplines.

Looking to feminist legal theorists who proposes a model of human rights based on vulnerability and care-giving rather than autonomy and resilience, Browne’s project at UCD will explore tactics and choreographies of cultivating more empathic bodies. Looking also to the sport culture on campus, often considered outside the space of art, she will consider physical culture as a space of both potential transformation and social and political coding. Where classically the gymnasium can be a place of cultivating individualised ideals of physical perfection, this project inverts this goal, appropriating some of the framework of ‘training’ to work instead towards deeper understandings of vulnerability and inter-dependency.