Niamh O'Malley
A thread difficult to string together is this selection of works. All created by artists sharing the fact of being Irish, either by birth or adoption. Despite our increasingly digital realms, nationalities still reflect political structures ruling societies and agglutinating feelings of belonging. Revolving it all[1], revealing the intervening tensions between attachment and identity, beauty and evil of a land, memory and dreams, light and shadows, artistic practices can question these structures. In a quiet gallery space, domestic while alien, shuffling footsteps are heard. By pacing through it, the audience is invited to sense the comings and goings, the impressions here proposed by the artists. And to choreograph a rhythm of their own through the fragmentation of voices present in the exhibition.
The gallery rooms give a pause, to hold off administrative time and space, providing a sort of limbo. In its shadows, Bassam Issa Al-Sabah’s built environment offers a landscape reflecting the dissonant nature of recollection and the processes of self-reconstruction. A few steps away, the sequenced fields of Niamh O’Malley wave while being walked through them. And Laura Ní Fhlaibhín’s nourishing pastures grow at a lick of distance. Consciously caring, to be cared about. Pause. A glimmering way of fogged, wrinkled mirrors, rhythmically placed by Laura Gannon, treads towards mythic sceneries and rustles. Pause. Bodies of water, shaped in coloured wood by Alice Maher dance in silence, their kidnapped voices at their feet. While Lauren Gault’s underwater void is the vortex of expanding echoes. Revolving it all. It all ends where it began, in a domestic while alien room. Inside out, Alan Magee works on the skin of the vital forces displayed in traction but still, in a familiar room, distorted by Mairead O’hEocha’s dreamy and luminescent inner visions. Hold ten seconds. Fade out.
Through the exhibition itinerary, as in Samuel Beckett’s Footfalls, the mother(land) voice comes from the dark, off-stage, out of sight but thickly present. A voice of command, incessant, longed for, caring and imprisoning, driving a fragmented proposal that might eventually fall into rhythm. An exhibition proposal waving, from the artists to the viewer and return, echoing across borders and lands and corridors and rooms.
[1] “Revolving it all”, “Pause”, and “Hold ten seconds. Fade out” are direct quotes freely used from original Samuel Becketts’s short play Footfalls: Beckett, S. Collected Shorter Plays. London: Faber and Faber, 1984. P. 237-243.
