sun, waiting for flawless / an ghrian, ag feitheamh le foirfe
Thursday 9 May – Saturday 29 June 2024
Project Arts Centre, No.39 East Essex Street, Temple Bar, Dublin
Robin O’Shea and Ronan Smyth and Francis Whorrall-Campbell
sun, waiting for flawless / an ghrian, ag feitheamh le foirfe includes a wide range of sculptural approaches, including metalwork, woodturning, drawing, collage, printed media and writing. It looks at the presentation of self and the subjective potential of materials, their expressive and affective power. The title ‘sun, waiting for flawless’ is inspired by the lyrics of a George Michael song and refers to the aspirational pursuit of flawlessness and perfection, while highlighting the impossibility of this.
An interest in industrial and craft processes is a through-line in the exhibition. Here, however, these methods and materials have been co-opted to explore personal landscapes. Standardised storage units have been softened by private memories and intimate details; uncanny magnetic souvenirs decorate fabricated steel sheets. Surfaces have been polished, buffed, obscured, smeared, embellished and scratched, as a way to activate the states between detail and distance, transparency and opacity, knowing and unknowing.
Robin O’Shea’s work engages with their family’s history of farming in rural south-west Wexford, and explores our relationship with nature and labour. Recently O’Shea discovered a collection of their father’s academic drawings from the early 1970s made as part of his apprenticeship to become an agricultural mechanic. These appropriated images hang on imposing structures that act as ‘set pieces’, staging personal history on a dense background of pattern and repetition.
Ronan Smyth investigates relationships between the amateur maker and the decorative surface, prioritising the histories of DIY, self-taught and hobbyist pursuits while blurring distinctions between fine art, craft and design-led disciplines. Smyth aims to disrupt our understanding of cultural authenticity, proposing a series of improvised material strategies that explore the decorative surface as a site of novelty, excess and anxiety.
Francis Whorrall-Campbell’s THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT HAVE BEEN DOWNLOADED is a zine consisting of the first three instalments of a serialised novella-in-progress. Reprinted with a new addition, the zine presents the story so far, introducing us to the two protagonists – a trans influencer living in the year 2034, and a fictionalised version of Kurt Cobain in 1994 – as the pair travel in opposite directions across the USA, looking for the source of the paranormal phenomena disrupting their lives.
→ Exhibition Handout
