The Meaning of Nothing/ Limerick Gallery of Art, Ireland 2014

The Meaning of Nothing/ A five-room site-specific installation examined the issue of permanence and personal history. One of the gallery spaces had clay spread over five museum display cabinets lit from within. The clay was gathered from the Coonagh brickfields site, upstream on the river Shannon from Limerick, his home town. Being created from the same clay/bricks as parts of the city of Limerick, sharing the same genetic build-up, the work grew and developed its own identity through iteration and evolution within the space.

In the gallery's atrium was suspended a large cast form and a frieze of fifty-nine photographs, each revealing a single recently-made snowball, abandoned in the silent landscape, its young (or old) maker now safely at home. Together they seem the same, but each snowball is subtly different, the work of an uninhibited maker who toiled untrammelled to leave something new and magnificent in the public space. But soon enough the work will begin to change, its elements warming, dissolving, dripping, and flowing back into the waiting earth. Now the viewer’s gaze shifts to a hulking survivor, a cast snowball that seems to be as its maker left it. More likely, however, it has been netted, identified, preserved, and pinned in place high above the Gallery atrium. It remains a stranded segment of another culture – a representative piece, perhaps – but one plucked from its context, a dull, disembodied evocation of its long-departed maker.

Essays by Mark Leahy and John Logan

Exhibition Curated by Helen Carey