Jaki Irvine

Jaki Irvine writes, composes and creates video installations in which image and musical score overlap, coalesce and diverge. Contested histories, sonic bricolage, the built environment, and the peripheral or undervalued have all found their way into Jaki Irvine’s deep-reaching, polyphonic works. Her attention is often turned to the peripheral or the undervalued: recentring stories or figures written out of history, songs that filter through a city's streets, overheard conversations, the flap of a hummingbird's wings. She works on solo projects and in collaboration with other artists and musicians, moving between overt musicality and the edges where a sound begins or ends. Jaki Irvine makes space for strangeness, blurring the boundary between the real and the imagined, the familiar and unknowable. She focuses on the rigours and pleasures of looking with a listening eye.

Her works frequently involve different iterations, conceived and presented as single or more complex multi channel sound/video installations and as live events, often with video and with live musicians.

Jaki Irvine lives and works in Dublin. She is represented by the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and Frith Street Gallery, London and is a member of Aosdana. Recent works include If the Ground Should Open… (2016), a multi-channel sound and video installation commemorating the Easter Rising of 1916. It takes the names of two forgotten freedom fighters Elizabeth O’Farrell and Julia Grenan as ‘the ground’ of a score for nine musicians. Irvine composed the eleven tracks using an oral scoring system originally developed for Scottish Highland pipes. Irvine describes how ‘the past and the present are reflected through a lens that is complicated, joyful, furious and hopeful’. Ack Ro’, (2019), is an ambitious immersive installation consisting of a thirteen-channel video piece accompanied by a sound composition, and 28 looping pink neons all spelling out anagrams derived from the words Cracklin’ Rosie, the title of a Neil Diamond song from 1970. Irvine collaborated with Locky Morris to develop the multi-channel sound/video installation Re_Sett_ings (2022-23) for the Complex, Dublin and Void Gallery, Derry. Shhh Ow (2025) included a live performance with musicians in Temple Bar Gallery + Studios atrium which co-incided with the re-staging of Ack Ro’ in the iconic DeLaWarr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea. This also included a newly commissioned 28 metre window work for the gallery and a live performance with musicians in the DeLaWarr’s auditorium.