Bern Roche Farrelly Artist’s Statement

Using familiar systems such as multiplication grids, dinner table manners, telephone help lines and “choose your own adventure” novels, Bern Roche Farrelly develops game like structures and performances that allow the audience to share authorship through negotiation and participation.

Bern Roche Farrelly treats each of his artworks as a language game, drawing his audience into a dialogue which foregrounds the difficult relationship between the everyday world in which we live and the linguistic structures that we use to mediate it. A concern with the mechanics of meaning predominates; how does a particular word or gesture become a signifier, and what differentiates a signifier that simply holds a specific sense from one that holds a profound significance. His practice ultimately asks how do people come to find value in the world around them?

The work does not suggest any meaning beyond the audience’s direct experience of it. The props, texts and actions presented give form to a complex system of interconnected elements. Yet these artefacts are not the substance of the work, rather they are, as Wittgenstein put it “Assembled reminders with a purpose.” The work is only activated once the viewer begins to make choices within it, colouring the work with their own interpretations.

The formal nature of the work allows each element to exist independently as well as being part of a gestalt. For example, both ‘Conductor’ and ‘Determine’ are large scale, open ended performance works constructed from many other independent performances, each one of which keeps its own form. The structures that link these works then become the architecture of the whole piece.

Like the letters of the alphabet these elements can be endlessly re ordered to suggest new meanings. This modular approach means that the implications of any one part of the work are always shifting, as the various combinations and permutations are played out. This context of shifting connotations, with each gesture robbed of any suggestion of intent, strips the work of conventional interpretations and opens up the underling questions of how it might it contain meaning.

The live element allows for the language centred to be pierced by a moment of interpretation. The performance of each work literally brings it to life, emphasising exemplifying the themes rather than commenting upon them. Here the performer is a conduit for dialogue between the work and the audience, who are required to relinquish their position as passive observers.

The language games presented force the audience to weave word and action together. Each attempt to read an order into the work results in the viewers writing their own rules for how to perform or behave.  The negotiations that take place between the audience and the performer highlight the shared nature of meaning.