Exhibition open: 14, 15 and 19–22 June, 2–6 pm

Part of the airWG series

isn’t all land holy, every structure a temple explores dwelling through the lens of ownership, memory, wildness and pseudo-ritualisms.

The exhibition follows an intimate narrative between pre-built spaces and sacred ones, using found and sought objects, moving image and sound to consider their contemporary entanglement. Additionally the work seeks to question what entitles us to land and how built dwelling spaces impose on their occupants.

The artist integrates the imagery of a ‘round’ — an encircling of a sacred or holy space (usually) in an anticlockwise fashion — as a guide within the gallery through a series of personal encounters with embodied memories of owned and pre-built spaces. This round is mirrored in a video work in which the performer navigates a grocery store. Filmed from the perspective of a colonial cartographer, a top-down mapping is shown of the space in which the land is viewed as a lifeless commodity.

Brooches fashioned out of car seat buckles cling to the walls of the gallery space and harvested brambles lie bundled beneath a replica of a wrench tool used in colonial rope making. 

Along with this the artist provides a series of personal artefacts of entitlement, a childhood carseat and phonebook records referencing one E.Mccoy— presumed architect of their family home.

From the rear of the car seat, boiled, sterilised dirt spills outward. Planted within is the seed of a lone hawthorn tree — a species long associated in Irish folklore with the Aos Sí, descendants of the Tuatha Dé Danann. 

Such hawthorns remain scattered across modern, commercial pastures — left undisturbed not by law, but by folklore, superstition, and quiet reverence.

Writer and poet Max Mccabe responds to the work with a written text read by the artist’s mother in an accompanying sound piece.