The Banal & Spectacular with Jennifer O'Brien

Date: Thu 15 October 2026 
Time: 11am (90mins) 
Price: Free, booking required 
For: Post-primary class groups / Public 

To book a class group, please contact Deirdre: deirdre.rogers@solsticeartscentre.ie

Join exhibiting, local artist Jennifer O’Brien in the gallery for a performative talk about her work in our current exhibition ‘The First Frontier Was the Horizon’. Tracing the material and architectural influence of Navan on her practice, O’Brien will reflect on how places such as The Navan Shopping Centre and the N51 Bridge have left a lasting impression on her way of seeing and making. She will consider how the utilitarian and the functional can become both subject and material, questioning how everyday architectures and infrastructures can shape our understanding of landscape, memory, and place.

Approaching these sites not as neutral spaces but as locations where political, historical, and emotional experiences converge, O'Brien will explore her personal relationship to them. Roads, public buildings, transport networks, and systems of movement are often understood as purely functional, yet they embody complex histories and ideologies that continue to shape both her artistic practice and the ways in which the Irish landscape is inhabited, experienced, and understood. Following the talk, attendees will be invited to take part in a postcard-making workshop that responds to their immediate local surroundings and lived experience. Using photography and writing, participants will explore and reflect on Navan's historical and contemporary built environment, creating personal responses to the places they encounter.

Open to the public, this talk supports students completing their Junior and Senior Cycle Visual Art studies, in particular Content Area 3: Today’s World.

Jennifer O’Brien (b.1996) is a Meath-born artist working across installation, film, sculpture, and text. Her work explores the Irish state’s pursuit of modernity, speed, and efficiency, examining how these ambitions continue to shape both the landscape and lived experience of contemporary Ireland. Central to O'Brien's practice is an exploration of place. Mapping the afterlives of industrial, architectural and infrastructural development, she focuses on the overlooked spaces beneath, between, and beside these systems. Rather than reproducing narratives of progress, O'Brien is interested in moments of stasis, failure, and absurdity that emerge within them, revealing unexpected poetics between the banal and the spectacular.