“When you become the sun, shadows disappear.” Anon.

My Mother, My Shadow, an exhibition by Irina Brook

HOT’s Judy Parkinson spoke to Irina Brook in advance of her exhibition, My Mother, My Shadow at Electro Studios.

Irina Brook is an award-winning, international theatre director who lives in East Sussex. Her exhibition, My Mother, My Shadow, will include a special one-off event at 6pm on Saturday 13^th August hosted by the artist, together with the veteran actor and special guest performer Geoffrey Carey. Brook created this show with reference to House of Us especially for the Electro Studios gallery.

For the past four years, Brook has been working on House of Us, an autobiographical, multi-dimensional piece that combines an immersive meta-theatrical journey with an intimate visual diary. The project is anchored around Irina’s loving celebration of her mother, the actress Natasha Parry, who died in 2015. The first iteration of House of Us opened in Palermo in September 2021 and is currently being reimagined for Venice’s atmospheric Casa dei Tre Oci Museum, where it will open in November, produced by the Teatro Goldoni.

In advance of this, Electro Studios invited Brook to share some fragments and essences from House of Us in an intimate gallery setting. The result is My Mother, My Shadow, an exhibition of paintings, photography and multi-media works, all stemming from Irina’s sense of inherited invisibility, as a daughter, woman and artist.

“My mother, Natasha’s loneliness and lifelong search for meaning, wrapped up in an all-consuming love for theatre, take on various forms throughout the gallery spaces,” explains Brook. “My father was a sunny figure and I have realised my mother represented the moon. Over the last few years, I have thought about my orbit between them and explored the moon side. I have begun to understand my mother through writing, painting and photography, and what it feels like as a woman to be invisible and voiceless. I seem to be obsessed with my own shadow, and how that links up with the shadow of my mother.”

Brook, daughter of the late director Peter Brook and actress Natasha Perry was born in Paris and grew up between England and France. Aged 18, she studied with Stella Adler in New York and performed there, Paris and London before deciding to dedicate her time to a successful directing career in Paris and Lausanne. In 2003, Irina formed her own theatre company, which toured extensively in France, reinventing the classic opera and theatre for new audiences. Her last major UK show was an iconoclastic version of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt at the Barbican in 2004, with a soundtrack by Iggy Pop. Her shows have been performed around the world, including Japan, the UK, Austria, Italy and USA. From 2014-2019, Brook was Artistic Director of the Théâtre National de Nice (TNN). Here, alongside her own theatre productions, she created Shake Nice! – the first international Shakespeare festival in France, and Réveillons-nous! (Let’s Wake Up!), an eco-festival inspired by the COP21 summit.

“House of Us is literally my life,” she declares. “Born in theatre, done theatre, directed theatre, been the head of a theatre. It’s 50 years.  Theatre, theatre, theatre.”

My Mother, My Shadow by Irina Brook

Venue: Electro Studios Project Space, Seaside Road, St Leonards-on-Sea, TN38 0AL

Dates: Saturday 13^th & Sunday 14^th August 2022

Times: 12 noon until 7pm

Free entrance

Website: http://www.electrostudiosprojectspace.co.uk/forthcoming-exhibitions/

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