IAN WIECZOREK - Visual Artist

Sepulchre

Intervention / Sculptural installation
Commissioned as part of Greenway Sculpture Project 2012

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Sepulchre is a site-specific installation created by whitewashing the internal walls of a derelict cottage. The act of painting the internal walls emphasises the architectural geometry of the structure within its landscape, and presents the building as a 'found' sculpture. Applied to the inside surfaces rather than the outside, the white paint adds a notional contradiction, alluding to the orderliness of former occupancy, while the outside reflects its current state of dereliction. The title Sepulchre has its own allusive connotations as a place not intended for life, and associated ideas of abandonment that find resonances in both historical and contemporary Irish experience.

- Ian Wieczorek
(text, 2012)

Location:
Sepulchre is located in a derelict cottage on the Greenway at the N59 Rosscahaill turnoff, situated between Westport and Newport, Co. Mayo, Ireland.
Coordinates: 53°49'57.9"N 9°33'12.4"W (53.832760, -9.553446)

Aditional notes by the artist:

The act of painting the internal walls of the building emphasises the architectural geometry of the structure within the landscape. The uniformity of the paint removes any material distractions and looks to the formal properties of the structure. It becomes a found sculpture in the vernacular of a geographically typical cottage.
Applied to the inside surfaces rather than the outside, the white paint adds a notional contradiction, alluding to the orderly tidiness of its former occupancy, while the outside reflects its current state of dereliction. (This ‘inside out’ concept in part references Rachel Whiteread’s inverted plaster cast house Ghost, itself an aesthetic discourse of a derelict London townhouse prior to demolition.)
The title Sepulchre has its own allusive connotations, both as a place not intended for life but rather interment, and also the Biblical reference to ‘whited sepulchres’, tombs that annually whitewashed to prevent the people from accidentally coming in contact with them (Jewish law considered those persons unclean who had touched anything belonging to the dead.) Empty, it also engenders allusions to historical notions of emigration and eviction.

- Ian Wieczorek
(text, 2012)