Jimmie Durham participated in IMMA’s Artists’ Residency Programme and his ‘Map of the Sky…’ was created during that period and later shown in ‘From Beyond the Pale’, a series of exhibitions that explored the relationships between hitherto marginal centres of visual art culture and its economic centre.
The use of found objects, such as the crab and pecan nut in this picture, alludes to the classical Western philosophical and cultural divisions between the mind and the body, and between the sensual and the intellectual – divides which Durham refutes by combining artefacts from the ‘real’ world with the painted one.