Glossaries for Forwardness
Thursday 27 April – Saturday 23 September 2023
Museum Building, Trinity College Dublin
Marie Farrington
Glossaries for Forwardness is a multi-platform project by Marie Farrington, examining convergences between landscape and memory through the architecture of the Museum Building in Trinity College Dublin. This project arose from Farrington’s artist residency at Trinity Centre for the Environment (2021–22) where her research approached geological sampling methods as ways to explore our interpretation of landscape, and how land can be implicitin its own representation and display.
The Museum Building (1853–57) is a seminal work of Ruskinian Gothic architecture. The building itself can be thoughtof as a geological collection; it is constructed from a vast catalogue of stone types. Glossaries for Forwardness presents site–responsive works installed throughout the foyer of the Museum Building. Sculptural and textile interventions present an extensive material glossary that reference the building’s interior, repurposing geological sampling methods such as thin-sectioning, microscopic imaging and resin-mounting into modes of making in the studio. In collaboration with Stanislaw Welbel, a spatial audio installation emanates from the ventilation shafts, composed on a synthesiser by translating the building’s various stones into a strata of layered sound. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with texts by Dr. Quentin Crowley, Anneka French and Marie Farrington, and a public engagement programme including talks, screenings, listening sessions and an event in collaboration with the Department of Ultimology.
Glossaries for Forwardness offers an invitation to reimagine human relations to land, making space for the active agencyof landscape to emerge. As deep-time materials intersectwith momentary human gestures, the geological actions that formed the Museum Building’s architecture – layering, folding,stacking, accumulation and erasure – become concentrated in the act of making. The exhibition is a call for forwardness, a linear push across one state of being and into another, encouraging a critical engagement with the representative frameworks through which the climate crisis is mediated.
Supported by the Arts Council, Trinity College Dublin, Trinity Centre for the Environment, Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Dublin City Council and Fire Station Artists’ Studios.
Design by Models & Constructs.
→ Exhibition Handout
→ Public Programme 1
→ Public Programme 2
→ Publication
