top of page
Ceramic impossible horse artwork
colour-logoTrans.png
2022ii.jpg
AnnaBarden2022Filly(3)(4).jpg

I prefer to draw the black pawn, and have played chess in a lunatic asylum. One patient versus another. Inside, the signs are not pieces of information, but instructions. Exit doesn't describe where the door but is an order: open it. Every move in chess is examined, dissected for motive, meaning. But if the exit sign's meaning is skewed, king's pawn to open will be portentous, loaded threatening. 

My fellow patient set up the board; the game progressed, accompanied by gestures and mutterings whose meaning is insignificant outside but inside denotes friend or foe, benign or malign. 

Check. My king is caught by his knights. A classic scissors. The horse which moves like a crab. The scissors takes forward planning, tactical thinking and patience. 

But both knights are on a black square. A nurse sees the mounting tension, frustration. The game is null and void. 

My attempt to keep to the rules of chess as they are outside will gain me my freedom to go there. My fellow patient will never leave. 

2022Falter1.gif
Ceramic Horse, Text in background. Artwork

Falter Check Resolve. Installation View. Studio 12 Backwater Artists Group Cork 2022

The drawings in this exhibition charted the progress of the chess game in Beckett's Murphy. Accompanied by an autobiographical text (above) and 7 impossibly contorted ceramic horses. 
 

AnnaBardenChessPiece16InkPencilonPaper55x70cm2022.jpeg
bottom of page