'Interview With The Vampire' from 'The Lick Drawings' Series Painting

Jenny Keane is a visual artist based in Belfast. Her practice is focused on the word 'horrific'. Through video installation and performative drawings, the work explores the self-portrait in an attempt to investigate the dichotomy between fear and desire, its relationship to language and connection to the (female) body. Abjection and the Uncanny have been very influential in the practice, as has Feminist thought as well as theories of language and psychoanalysis. The work has always had references to contemporary visual culture, and the most important influence is society's fascination with fear and its artistic expression in horror films. The theorist Barbara Creed discusses the horror film as 'constantly restaging the threat and rejection of the feminine.' Images of blood, vomit, faeces, hair, etc. are central to our socially constructed notions of the horrific. Keane's practice of both video installations and drawings are focused on 'liminality' and the idea of compulsive repetition; a pause or loop that subverts narrative. This repeating becomes a play between an internalised traumatic event and a sensual meditation.