We Are Suddenly Somewhere Else 2013
Selection of install and detail images:
Gilt 2013
120 preserved butterflies, gold leaf
Dimensions Variable (Plinth size 60 cm x 30 cm)
In each space O'Gorman balances the sensually appealing with the discordant in intriguing ways - the lavish images of food, half eaten or preserved in aspic, are determinedly unappetising, while the neat circle of butterfly wings partially trapped beneath gold leaf is both chilling and gorgeous. O'Gorman's sensitivity to scale accentuates the disquieting atmosphere…
These objects play with the poetry of stasis and decay, serving as stimuli that trigger inward looking, raising questions about memory or imaginings of a forgotten past or of potential futures.
Excerpts from an essay on We Are Suddenly Somewhere Else by Sarah Kelleher, April 2013
Bone Meal 2012/13
Slip cast bone china implements, wood
Dimensions Variable (Plinth size 130 cm x 20 cm)
Photograph by Roland Paschhoff
In Bone Meal 2012, bone china (a substance once considered a luxury commodity, used for eating and drinking from) in its raw state contains animal matter which over time will expire or 'go off'. The process of slip casting allows for repetition in the creation of multiple utilitarian or decorative objects. The bone china and porcelain figurine is synonymous with Victorian aesthetic, design, and early industrial mass production.
The Silver 2012 (its title pertaining to a collection of valued objects, family heirloom or domestic ware) sterling silver implements appear austere, medical or scientific in function. Silver is a material known for its purifying properties and presented as such it is unclear whether they are decorative or intended as some kind of aid.
Wet Evening in April 2013
153 individual mirrored acrylic characters that make up the short poem 'Wet Evening In April' by Patrick Kavanagh - first published in Kavanaghs Weekly 19th April 1952.
The birds sang in the wet trees
And I listened to them it was a hundred years from now
And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.
But I was glad I had recorded for him
The melancholy.
Selection of stills from Sometimes the house of the future is better built II 2013
Single-channel HD video projection, surround sound
Camera by Neil O'Driscoll. Soundscape by Joe Harney.
'The show culminates in a languorous film, which tracks the picturesque crumbling of Evans Home, originally an almshouse, now designated as the future home of the Butler Gallery. Lingering shots trace the slow movements of dust motes floating in honeyed light, fingers of ivy reaching through boarded up windows, a moldering drift of discarded library books. Although film documents the passage of time and the inevitability of collapse, showing the traces of previous habitation and faded communities, the abiding sense is not of simple nostalgia or romantic fascination with decay. Instead O'Gorman invites the viewer to contemplate a space idling in suspended animation, replete with traces of its various histories, while it awaits its eventual re-development. The Italian born architect Simone Pizzagalli offers a compelling interpretation of the abandoned or decaying space. In his Archiprix-winning essay 'Space, Poetics and Voids' he underlines the importance of the disused space or 'void', which, he argues 'contains in itself, all the potential of the space, all the relations, not written or experienced. [...] Void is the place of tension, of something that will be, a space in power, but also the only place where the recollection of reality, the composition of the parts, fragments of life, can happen.'
Excerpt from an essay by Sarah Kelleher on the exhibition We Are Suddenly Somewhere Else, Butler Gallery, April 2013. Full text available here
We Are Suddenly Somewhere Else was a solo exhibition at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, IE, based upon it's future site - Evans Home. The exhibition takes its name from a quote from Martin Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art (circa 1930) - who states that: 'In the vicinity of the (art) work, we are suddenly somewhere else than we usually tend to be'. Footage of the interior of the gallery's future site (a former asylum for destitute/elderly servants, in a current state of dereliction) was projected onto the Butler Gallery's back wall. The accompanying sound-scape denotes a human presence, still hanging in the air - along with the suggestion that something is about to happen. Capturing strong traces of it's former use as an institution, the installation prompts a recognition of the significance of this past for the present, including the role of the gallery as a potential catalyst for communicating alternative perspectives; for making what is private, public.
