EXPANDED/THINKING
-towards a practice of ‘the fragment’
cosprojects are initiated by Helen Kirwan a conceptual artist whose critical practice explores a range of interventionist and interactive strategies in the public sphere. She also employs phenomenological and spatial models of institutional critique using a variety of media and strategies. She works heuristically, that is to say, in a trial-and-error kind of a way. Generally her practice is collaborative connecting a wide range of contributors whether artists or otherwise, from various spheres. She aims to stimulate questions and interactions within sites and situations; to prompt encounters, relations and experiences, to expand the possibilities for art beyond established modes of production and distribution.
Helen Kirwan has been exhibiting and developing projects since 1996, in the UK, France and Belgium and, as part of a collaborative practice known as B+K, has exhibited and lectured in the UK, Singapore and Korea. In 1999 she created ‘COS’, Cultural Operations and Services Ltd which engages in forms of cultural resistance and institutional critique through explorations of social relations and positions of institutional power. She currently works in the UK and Belgium.
Helen Kirwan practised as a barrister in Dublin and London before becoming a full time artist in c.1996. She took a B.A. First Class Honours in Fine Art at the Kent Institute of Art and Design, Canterbury (now the University College for the Creative Arts) followed by an M.F.A. in Fine Art Practice and Theory from the University of Middlesex, London. She also studied Aesthetics and Art Theory at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at the University of Middlesex taking an M.A. with Merit in 2004. Her philosophical research involved an analysis of Early German Romanticism’s (especially Frederich Schlegel’s) concepts of the philosophical fragment and of criticism in terms of their possibilities and enduring themes for a contemporary fine art practice. Essentially, cosprojects are an extension of these investigations- a form of practical philosophy.
Helen Kirwan
Heron Manor, Chilham, Kent, CT4 8DG
tel:+ 44(0)1227-730256
fax:+ 44(0)1227-732423
mobile 07789 431760
e-mail: enquiries@cosprojects.co.uk
website: www.cosprojects.co.uk