Marie Farrington, Sibyl Montague, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín and Liliane Puthod.
Opening Reception: Sat 01 July, 2:30pm, all are welcome, no booking required.
Exploring their artworks on display, join Marie Farrington, Sibyl Montague, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín & Liliane Puthod in the gallery on Saturday 9 September, where they will explore subjects from landscape, architecture, folklore and contemporary consumerism, which has influenced the sculptural works and expanded practice seen in the gallery.
Curated by Brenda McParland
Hammerheads is a group exhibition by four dynamic Irish artists Marie Farrington, Sibyl Montague, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín and Liliane Puthod who explore diverse approaches to sculpture and expanded practice. The exhibition title Hammerheads conveys the insights, energy and attitude of the artists to sculpture making in the contemporary world. The artists have produced predominantly new sculpture and site-specific installations featuring both handmade and industrial materials in response to the galleries and courtyard spaces of Solstice.
The artists’ interest in materiality is evident in a broad range of materials including wax, volcanic olivine sand, acid-etched glass, cast ink, archaeological drafting film, steel, stone, bronze, found objects, consumer products, recycled fabric, medicinal healing plants and distilled lavender oil. Works in the exhibition explore themes such as the intersections between landscape and memory, consumerism, politics of care, biodiversity and the temporality of contemporary consumption in a globalised world.
Gallery Information:
The gallery is located on level 3 in Solstice Arts Centre
Opening times: Tuesday to Saturday / 11.00am - 4.00pm
Entrance to the gallery is free of charge
Solstice Arts Centre is wheelchair accessible
Supporting students exploring Content Area 3: Today’s World of the Visual Art curriculum, this resource touches on themes of expanded art practice and contemporary sculpture by four young artists.
All artworks discussed are site-specific installations using multiple components, found objects, textiles, handmade and industrial materials.
Marie Farrington's practice articulates intersections between landscape and memory, exploring how matter is coded and transformed over time. She employs casting as a sculptural process to construct material archives that capture residual aspects of sites. Her practice alludes to the act of making as a geological gesture, defined by continuous tensions between accrual and removal / accumulation and erasure.
For Hammerheads, Marie presents new site-specific works that respond directly to the gallery space and perform a subtle mapping of its schematics. Informed by geological field-sampling and imaging, these installations are premised on the x, y and z axis of the space, acting as testing grounds that feel both diagrammatic and ephemeral. A broad range of materials including volcanic olivine sand, acid-etched glass, archaeological drafting film, cast ink, muslin, anthracite, steel and wax converge in these works, evoking a spectral presence through unfixed or provisional elements. By centralising dust and other bi-products of their own production, the works included in Hammerheads imply a circuitry and circularity: they refer to, and hold residues of, each other's construction. The works reflect on sculpture's relationship to memory, imagehood and visibility, exploring surface as an archive of material relationships and as a site of intense contact between the history and future of an object.
Marie Farrington is an artist from Co. Kildare, Ireland. She lives and works in Dublin. Recent exhibitions include Oonagh Young Gallery, Dublin (2022); Galerie Michaela Stock, Vienna (2022); VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow (2021) and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019). She is a 2023-25 Research Associate at CCA Derry-Londonderry and artist-in-residence at Dublin City Council’s Residential Studios, Albert Cottages. Her work is currently included in The Wave, Collecteurs, The Digital Museum of Private Collections: a platform of the New Museum’s cultural incubator (2022-∞). Ongoing and forthcoming projects include Glossaries for Forwardness, a solo exhibition at the Museum Building, Trinity College Dublin (until 23 Sept 2023); Swim in the landscape, walk on the sea, a permanent public commission for Skerries Art Trail, Dublin, (2023); a Percent for Art Commission at Ardgillan Community College, Balbriggan (2023), a residency at SEA Foundation Tilburg (2023); and a solo exhibition titled Relics in Reverse at PuntWG, Amsterdam (2024). Her work is held in public collections including the Arts Council, the OPW and Trinity Centre for the Environment.
https://www.mariefarrington.com/
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Sibyl Montague’s multidisciplinary practice combines textile, digital, vegetable, and ‘poor’ material sources with the hacking and disassembly of commodity goods and media. Her varied practice often plays with systems of value and worth, where the taking apart and reassembling of found material reveal the economies of labour and extraction embedded within them. Frequently making and clustering her work under titles, ongoing series such as ’Hand held’ feature bottles, tools, charms, jars and organic matter. Collections of detritus and street material are presented in carefully crafted arrangements and assemblages imbued with importance and symbolic meaning.
Montague’s recent solo exhibition and film installation Claí na Péiste (Worm’s Ditch) at Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin focused on culturally symbolic references to the pig in Irish folklore, everyday life and contemporary ecology.
For Hammerheads Sibyl exhibits new and recent works from her ‘Blanket’ series; sculptural and patchwork assemblages made from used and found textiles. Displayed on low plinths close to the ground, the pale pink, blue or green striped wool blankets are the familiar bedding typical of households in Ireland. Made chronologically since 2020, each blanket has been cut, dyed or stained. Either boiled with tobacco or painted with rainbow bleeds, the worn and patched surfaces are appliquéd and embroidered by hand. Rags and cut offs gathered from fast fashion outlets, end sales and thrift shops are interwoven with French lace, table linen, dish cloths and GAA tops. A shearling coat, sports gear and faux furs have been reconstituted back into corpus forms, bound and bundled together as parcels or back packs.
Montague’s practice of mixing and layering image, text and form distorts them beyond context. Corporate logos, tourist memorabilia, high street fashion prints and slogans merge into a mosaic of DIY patchwork. Displayed together for Hammerheads, the blankets share elements that begin to describe a larger mosaic or story.
Sibyl Montague's (Dublin, Ireland) practice includes sculpture, assemblage, video and installation. Recent exhibitions include Claí na Péiste (Worm's Ditch), Temple Bar Gallery +_ Studio, Dublin, (solo 2022); Fashion Show: Clothing Art and Activism, Glucksman Gallery, Cork (2022), The Narrow Gate of Here and Now – Social Fabric, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, (2021-22); 4Ever Chemical screening with AEMI, Project Arts Centre, Dublin (solo 2021); The Law is a White Dog, Curated by Sarah Browne, TULCA, Galway Arts Centre (2020); SELF SOOTHERS, VISUAL, Carlow (solo 2020); Saplings, Pallas Projects, Dublin (solo 2018); Practice, New Spaces Project, Derry and My Fears of Tomorrow are Melting Away, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (solo; both 2018).
www.sibylmontague.com
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Laura Ní Fhlaibhín completed her MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019 and her BA at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin in 2013. She lives and works between London and Ireland. Laura Ní Fhlaibhín works with materials related to healing and nourishment. Sifting stories, materials and traces associated with site, memory, myth, narratives of care and the casting of spells, she creates complex but pithy material scenarios. These may incorporate condensed sculptural images, drawings, text, performance and formal gatherings of elements that serve as ritual artefacts and talismans. Care is both represented and inscribed in the material and narrative improvisations that are interwoven in her sculptural assemblages.
Laura Ní Fhlaibhín’s works explore current scientific research and tacit, inherited knowledge into the therapeutic potential of some medicinal plants in the treatment of dementia. Lemon balm, sage and lavender grow in the courtyard spaces, plants that are all regarded as supportive neurobiological agents, to guard against memory loss. These plants are pollinators too. Inside the gallery, Laura’s works operate within a circulatory system and sculptural assemblage; a herbal bouquet is held atop charred wood, drying in the light. The plant matter is distilled into oil, using scientific apparatus. The artist cast adult medical drinking beakers in bronze, and they are arranged in a spatial constellation of matter, as both functionary containers and amulets, to hold oils and water. A series of plastic medical boxes are arranged in a spatial constellation of matter, containing and holding plants, metals, oils and water. The plant oils circulate through the gallery, as a gesture of care to the viewer.
Selected exhibitions include: ‘Wet Wishes’ solo show at Britta Rettberg Gallery, Munich (2023); ‘Wishes for a wet warm afterlife by the blue willow pleasure pool’, solo show Green on Red Gallery, Dublin (2022); ‘Slug Love’ solo project, Luna Elaine Project Space, London (2022); ‘Our Lot’ site specific project, Bermondsey(2022); ‘Materials for virtue/Incandescent flare’, Britta Rettberg Gallery, Munich (2022), ‘Trailblazer’ solo show at Pallas Projects Dublin (20210; ‘Beuys Open Source’, Belmacz, London (2021);‘Conditions’, Croydon, London (2021); ‘Society of Nature, On Curating, Zurich (2021); ‘Gargle’, BowArts Almacantar, (2020); ‘Róisín, silver, rockie’ solo show at Palfrey, London (2020); Tulca Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, 2021 and 2018, Deptford X, London (2018); ‘Dodecagon’, SpaceUnion, Seoul,(2017);‘Lamellae’, The Lab, Dublin (2016). She is the recipient of Goldsmiths Almacantar Bursary 2019, Next Generation Award 2020, ACE Developing Creative Practice Award 2021 and was shortlisted for Mark Tanner Sculpture Award 2023. Laura’s work features in the Arts Council of Ireland Collection.
http://www.lauranifhlaibhin.com/
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Liliane Puthod makes sculptures and large-scale interventions or what might be deemed to be a subversive appropriation of objects, images, and texts by using both industrial materials and handmade processes as a way to confront archaeological and commodified times. She manipulates some of societies existing modes of production and dissemination to investigate the elusive concept of time inherent to everyday life’s consumption and to subtly destabilise what she considers the fabrication of desire and its perceived value within our globalised world.
For Hammerheads, Liliane Puthod has created a series of new architectural and sculptural interventions based on revisited works. While questioning the relationship between temporality, commodities and advertisement strategies, this fresh body of work comically manipulates scale, flow and materials to emphasise underlying mass-production issues. From a large onomatopoeic wall painting Dream Up to a pocket size work Final Hours, passing through Doorbusters, punctuated by under-counter-fridge-like sculptures Shop Till You Drop After Cool Death (Back in 5) and a unique hand carved Kilkenny limestone slab Limited Stock, artwork titles appropriate advertising slogans which relate to decision making, immediacy, finitude and threshold reflecting somehow on human conditions within an everyday environment.
Liliane Puthod lives and works in Dublin. She graduated with a Master in Fine Arts at HEAD Geneva in 2013. Selected exhibitions include Woman in the Machine, VISUAL, 2021; Dissolving Histories: An Unreliable Presence, Golden Thread Gallery, 2020; Display, Link and Cure, The Complex, 2019; How Long After Best Before, Pallas Projects/Studios, 2019; Everything Must Go, PS2, 2019. Awards include Project Studio, Temple Bar Gallery+Studios; Arts Council of Ireland Visual Arts Bursary and Summer Studio Residency, TUD, Dublin.
https://www.lilianeputhod.net/
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