Border Crossings is an exhibition by Keith Crawford. It is an artistic response to changes within the population of Dungannon, a market town in Mid Ulster (Northern Ireland, the North or just Ireland).

Mostly the exhibited work is a result of study for a Masters degree in Art and Design at A.U.T. (Auckland University of Technology) in New Zealand. There are a few exceptions including “Peace at Last”, a work commissioned by Stefan Dixon in the 1980s.

With non-figurative work there is always the temptation to explain too much so I will put the work into a context and let the viewer make up their own mind as it was the people in and of Dungannon who inspired it.

My research was concerned with change/exchange and immigration as much as historic identity choices. I use borders and the edges of borders to inform my work. These borders are enclosures with varying degrees of porousness. They separate and join at the same time.

The work is consciously non-elitist. It is however very much subjective, imbued with my personal aspirations for people to better recognise rights of belonging and difference that have not been recognised for so long in Northern Irish communities. This specific Dungannon audience will test my work uniquely. It is my hope that some of them may recognise the referent of exchange which our newly culturally mixed community inspired.

As the present merges from the past into the future the borderlines shift. The move from dominant to residual, shifting borders everywhere. Life itself could be viewed as a series of border crossings. You might say that the crossing of borders is not a marginal activity.

Cultural exchange and adaptation is the focus of all the artefacts. Each of them speaks of moving between different realms and of searching for crossing points.

Much of the work is inspired by the “sticking out pictures” of the British artist Patrick Hughes and his thought provoking invention of “Reverse-Perspective”.

Keith Crawford