Mechanism/ Crawford Gallery of Art, Cork, Ireland 2019

Mechanism/ The Voices of Time

 Now I will do nothing but listen …

I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,

Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night …

            Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’ (1855)

 Now he saw the world beyond language. Was it the sphere of absolute muteness or on the contrary, the sphere of absolute language?

Pierre Klossowski (on Nietzsche’s final years). 1

 On encountering Andrew Kearney’s Mechanism exhibition at the Crawford Gallery, one might be forgiven for feeling that a threshold has been crossed into a distinctly Ballardian universe. From the reflective circular ‘portal’ suspended in front of the building’s main façade, reminiscent of the cosmic ‘mandala’ created by the biologist ‘Whitby’ in an empty swimming pool in J.G. Ballard’s short story The Voices of Time, to the preoccupation with sound, urban ecology and architecture in his The Sound Sweep (with its ‘sonivacs’ hoovering up sounds in buildings) manifested in Kearney’s sound and light installations in the gallery, a feeling of ‘presentiment’, that strange feeling of recognizing what has yet to come, so characteristic of JG Ballard’s writing, abounds.2 Kearney, like many writers as well as artists, has a particular talent for, and sensitivity towards, the scenographic. This present exhibition is the third chapter of a series begun in Paris and expanded for The Dock in Carrick-on-Shannon.

Part of an essay by Katherine Waugh. 

Part of this installation entitled Farther to the East is now part of the National Collection of Ireland 2020.