Opens Wednesday 11 February 7pm, runs until 22 March. Gallery reading / listening night Fri 27th February 7pm.
Open St Patrick's Day 2-5pm

The Lie of the Land is a multi-part project that will encompass an exhibition and a reading/listening night. The project examines the idea that there are certain materialities (both in the work and in the landscape) that seem to serve as cultural remnants. These remnants can sometimes define a certain Irish aesthetic in the landscape, or what might be perceived as one. Tackling well-trodden arguments around the monument, the ruin and modernity in Irish landscape and architecture, the project considers contemporary rural Ireland as shown through visual art and writing.

To accompany the exhibition, there will be both a talk and presentation featuring curator Miranda Driscoll and artist Adrian Duncan (Thurs 12^th Feb 11am) and a reading / listening event (Fri 27^th Feb 7pm) that will include a reading of short stories from Cork based writer Sara Baume and Berlin based artist Adrian Duncan. In addition to this radio producers Kevin Brew (RTÉ Radio 1) and Luke Clancy (Soundsdoable / RTÉ Lyric FM's Culture File) will play sound and stories from the radio archive reflecting their experience of the Irish landscape. The event will include an informal discussion.

Participating artists include visual artists Helen Devitt (sculpture/installation) (Cork), Kenneth O’Halloran (photography) (Dublin/L.A), Adrian Duncan (sculpture/installation, video, drawing) (Dublin/Berlin) and Jill Quigley (photography)(Belfast), writer Sarah Baume (Cork), and RTE Radio 1 producers Kevin Brew and Luke Clancy (Dublin). Curated by Miranda Driscoll.

Helen Devitt

Devitt’s practice considers the space between art and architecture. The work is an exploration of the making of place, both real and imagined. People construct place and place constructs people. The man-made cuts and casts that interrupt the natural landscape inform the enclosures and boundaries often echoed in the human psyche. A sense of place is re-imagined in the work through surface and material in which a resonance of a culture is embedded.
Helen Devitt website

Kenneth O’Halloran

O’Halloran’s work considers the ruin. This work looks at now-defunct handball alleys in rural Ireland. These once vibrant places are physical remnants of a culture long since passed. Like the dolmens John Montague crafted as a metaphor for the old people of his childhood, the ruins of these abandoned alleys bear silent testimony to a feature of Ireland that has perished through time and modernisation. These plain walls were once the thriving open-air theatres of their day. But the alley was more than a sporting venue; it became a vital anchor for the community and an invaluable leisure outlet. It also served as an unofficial meeting point for lovers and revolutionaries.
Kenneth O'Halloran website

Adrian Duncan

Duncan’s work centres around research of two key events in the history of the modernisation of Ireland; one around the Rural Electrification Scheme which began in 1946 and the other around a particular period of domestic construction in rural Ireland - from the early 1970s to late 1990s. This sustained wave of home building was triggered by a number of cultural, economic, educational, and political shifts in the modernising Irish state during the 1960s; but what began this period of building in earnest was the publication of Jack Fitzsimons’s Bungalow Bliss in 1971. Duncan’s work takes the form of sculpture, video, digital photography and a publication on his research produced specifically for this show.
Adrian Duncan website

Jill Quigley

Quigley’s work is about photographic representations of rural life, vernacular housing and landscape and how these correspond with actual lived experience. Quigley deliberately tries to disrupt romantic readings of domestic vernacular buildings though her own interventions in these spaces. 
Jill Quigley website