Marie Farrington, Sibyl Montague, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, Liliane Puthod

1 July — 16 September 

Opening Reception: Sat 1 July, 2:30pm, all are welcome, no booking required 

Curated by Brenda McParland

This exhibition presents new and recent works by four important Irish based younger generation artists whose practices are rooted in sculpture and expanded practice (such as drawing, video and writing).  The artists make sculptural works informed by their research, studio practice and their lived experience of working as an artist in society, as they explore a range of interests from landscape, architecture, folklore and consumerism.

Marie Farrington makes sculptures that uncover residual aspects of places by tracing the subtle forces and properties in materials. Farrington’s practice articulates intersections between landscape, visibility and histories of display, 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, approaching surfaces as semi-photographic indexes. By translating geological activities (such as folding, layering, compressing and stacking) into methods of making her work, her practice alludes to the studio as a geological site bound to processes of accrual and erasure. Farrington lives and works in Dublin.

Sibyl Montague explores how we regard, hold and consume objects and experiences within a politics of care. Sibyl Montague's practice includes sculpture, assemblage, video and installation. Her work explores trans-disciplinary forms of usability or the ‘hand held’ such as bottles of water, or jars of pickled vegetables, which are presented as series of assembled objects of use.  Montague has made larger hybrid forms of bundles, blankets, bags or swaddles that can be potentially worn or held with two arms. Montague’s recent solo exhibition and film installation Claí na Péiste at Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin focused on culturally symbolic references to the pig in Irish folklore, everyday life and contemporary ecology.  Montague lives and works in Dublin.

Laura Ní Fhlaibhín combines myth, personal recollection and oral histories in installations of sculptural elements and writing. Ní Fhlaibhín creates complex but pithy material scenarios combining myth, personal recollections and oral histories.  These may incorporate condensed sculptural images, mineral deposits, texts and formal gatherings of elements that also serve as ritual artefacts. Her work frequently implies the key category of care, of both self and others, humans and animals, objects and materials. Care is both represented and inscribed in the material and narrative improvisations that are interwoven in sculptural assemblages. Increasingly, perhaps amplified by the pandemic, rituals of mourning and remembering in a spirit of playful animacy are manifested.  Ní Fhlaibhín lives and works in Wexford and London.

Liliane Puthod makes sculptures and large-scale interventions of objects, images, and texts by using both industrial materials and handmade processes as a way to confront archaeological and commodified times. She manipulates  existing modes of production in society to investigate the elusive concept of time, inherent to daily human consumption, and to subtly destabilise what she considers the fabrication of desire and its perceived value within our globalised world. Her research investigates the relationship between labour, value, and function and questions how does the artist’s studio echo or differ from commonly held productive workspaces. Puthod lives and works in Dublin.