Moira Burke is a third year Bachelor of Fine Art student at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. She has been awarded the John and Mary Kerley Travelling Residency Scholarship to research the subjective, psychogeographic landscape of her experience as daughter of a man born into a Mother and Baby home and raised in an orphanage by Irish Catholic nuns. Her grandmother, Nora, young and pregnant, left County Mayo in the 1930s to become an ‘inmate’ in a Mother and Baby home. Moira returned to her grandmother’s place of birth with her own son, effecting a return of sorts, an experience and a relationship not possible for Nora and her son, Moira’s father.
Moira is resident at Cork Printmakers throughout February to create a suite of monoprints derived from this complex emotional and historical territory. These prints will become the basis of an expanded body of work on her return to Melbourne.