Jaki Irvine: Seven Folds in Time

'How odd other people are. How the world seems full of coincidences and signs meant just for me one moment, and utterly meaningless the next. How everything seems coherent, and then suddenly falls apart. Irvine’s oeuvre, comprising mainly films and videos, most often in the form of installations, explores not only the extremes of passion, of love and hate, of possession and loss – to the point at which these emotions become unrepresentable – but also the mundane and the everyday, the things that happen on a walk to the park or a trip on the underground, where people’s paths cross, and encounters are missed.'

 

– Michael Newman, 2008

Jaki Irvine’s work in film and video, whether in single-screen format or in more complex multi-screen installations, weaves together narratives in which image and musical score variously overlap, coalesce and diverge.

In the multi-screen installation Seven Folds In Time, the artist foregrounds the relationship between music and image, which has long been a significant aspect of her practice. Working with the violinist Marja Gaynor and the flautist Joe O’Farrell, Irvine has developed a work in which the editing process itself comes to the fore as an organising principal. Moving between overt musicality and the edges where a sound begins or ends, the artist focuses on the rigours and pleasures of playing an instrument, bringing together the private space of practice with the possibilities of performance it anticipates.