Pascal Bircher was born in Redhill (UK) in 1972. He has a BA Honours in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, London (2001) and a degree in Display & Exhibition Design from the School of Applied Arts, Vevey, Switzerland (1996). On completion of his Fine Art degree he moved to France, where he lived and worked for 14 years. In 2019 he moved to Ireland, before which he started an MPhil in Contemporary Art at John Moores University in Liverpool, until he realised that universities had become businesses with safe spaces.
Bircher’s work probes notions of origin, identity and memory, and how we rely on various forms of narrative, from the broad to the intimate, to formulate a sense of reality, through our personal and collective mythologies. He interweaves and dissects the edification processes, the mechanisms, the modalities, the representations and the interpretations of these interconnected mythologies, and the ways in which they evolve and mutate, in an attempt to reveal the chasm that is the unknown residing at the core of the human mind.
He further questions, with a blend of pessimism, awe and humour, the phenomena of appearance, disappearance and resurgence of form and meaning over time. By exploring the blind spots of our subjectivity, he toys with how we desperately try to fill the void, and bridge the gaps of our flawed and fissured perceptions and conceptions.
Someone once told him: “The allure of abysses is part of the charm and terror of your work.”
Bircher uses text, objects, drawing, installation, sculpture, video and photography. Each final piece involves a process that is a gradual shift from the expansive to the concise. Each piece involves beforehand a methodological process that can only conclude in the way it exists.
Bircher’s work probes notions of origin, identity and memory, and how we rely on various forms of narrative, from the broad to the intimate, to formulate a sense of reality, through our personal and collective mythologies. He interweaves and dissects the edification processes, the mechanisms, the modalities, the representations and the interpretations of these interconnected mythologies, and the ways in which they evolve and mutate, in an attempt to reveal the chasm that is the unknown residing at the core of the human mind.
He further questions, with a blend of pessimism, awe and humour, the phenomena of appearance, disappearance and resurgence of form and meaning over time. By exploring the blind spots of our subjectivity, he toys with how we desperately try to fill the void, and bridge the gaps of our flawed and fissured perceptions and conceptions.
Someone once told him: “The allure of abysses is part of the charm and terror of your work.”
Bircher uses text, objects, drawing, installation, sculpture, video and photography. Each final piece involves a process that is a gradual shift from the expansive to the concise. Each piece involves beforehand a methodological process that can only conclude in the way it exists.