Jaki Irvine was a member of Blue Funk, a group of artists that developed new media in Ireland from 1989 to 1993, working particularly on in-situ installations and engaged with societal subjects. She then went to London where she received a Masters of Fine Arts in 1994. In her film- and video-focused practice, language, text and narration are essential: the soundscape, languages, voice-over accents and musical choices (from Stravinsky to John Lurie, via Thomas Oboe Lee) are highly developed. As for the images, they explore human relationships, urban and natural spaces (birds in particular) in an insatiable, fragmented and distanced manner, often in dissonance with the sound. In single and multi-screen installations, the artist reveals the in-between, ambiguous situations, discontinuations, and unspecified scenes. Fiction and reality become blurred through snippets of recorded conversation and alternative perspectives.

The conventions of cinema and literary traditions (like Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, 1871) are at once ignored and referenced. In 1995, in her Super 8 film Star (1994) was presented in General Release, an exhibition dedicated to the young generation of British artists at the Venice Biennale, and in 1997 she represented Ireland at the same event. That year she was invited to the British School at Rome residency where she spent several years before returning to London to Delfina studios. In 2000 she curated an exhibition on the moving image, Somewhere Near Vada, before moving by to Ireland. J. Irvine realised large scale commissions like The Silver Bridge (2003), playing on stereotypes associated with witches and bats. The music, audio recordings and musical scores are featured in the orchestral installations Room Acoustics Revisited (2008) and Seven Folds in Time (2009).