Position One
2019
Marker on canvas (70 x 70cm) 3 from a series of 6
Series of blank art canvases that have been individually signed by the factory workers that made them in Daler Rowney Manufacturing, La Romana Free Trade Zone, the Dominican Republic. Daler Rowney is a British company and a popular supplier of professional art materials in Ireland. Their production is outsourced to the La Romana Free Trade Zone to avail of low tax rates and lax labour laws in the region.
The artist negotiated with the company and workers for several months to arrange for the canvases to be signed by the factory workers at the point of production and shipped to the artist in Ireland. The six workers volunteered to participate in the project, and it is arranged that sales of a canvas will be split 50/50 between the artist and the signatory.
Kerry Guinan is a conceptual artist working to critique the labour and property relations of globalised, neoliberal, and neocolonial capitalism through performance, delegated performance, intervention, installation, and new media. Recently she produced The Red Thread (2022), a monumental, live installation of sewing machines in the Complex, Dublin that were remotely controlled – in real time - by workers in a clothes factory in Bengaluru, India.
Other career highlights include curating TULCA Festival of Visual Arts: TACTICAL MAGIC in Galway (2019), her global-scale solo exhibition 'Our Celestial Sphere' at Pallas Projects/Studios, Dublin (2019), and co-founding and chairing Praxis: The Artists’ Union of Ireland (2020-23). Guinan recently submitted her PhD thesis ‘The Red Thread: An Artistic Critique of the Reified Social Relations of Globalising Capitalism’ for examination at the Limerick School of Art & Design, Technological University of the Shannon:Midwest. Originally from Donabate, Dublin, she is currently based in Limerick.
