Quarry, 2011
HDDvd projection, 9min 56sec loop, Black Polycotton Stretched over Plywood, 4m x 3m x 30mm (variable)
Exhibited: Glasshouse, (Solo) Bluecoat, Liverpool curated by Marie-Anne McQuay, A Terrible Beauty, Art, Crisis, Change, Dublin Contemporary 2011, Dublin, Ireland, Hå Gamle Prestegard, (Solo) Norway, 2012, The Mayo Collaborative, (Solo) Contemporary Survey of Niamh O’Malley in 5 venues, Co. Mayo, Ireland, Aras Inis Gluaire, Customs House Westport, Linenhall Arts Centre, Ballina Arts Centre, Ballinglen Arts Foundation, 2013,
Screened: Kooperation, Screening Room: Dublin, Film Screening curated Regina Barunke, Cologne Kunstverein, 2011.
Collection: GAM-Galleria Civica D'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, Italy
A filmic structure is used to examine an Irish limestone quarry, in terms of its duality as both a vast physical site and a non-site, a place built of displaced matter. Smithson talked about quarries as spaces of entropy, and they have a strange energy, they are in a sense monumental ruins, at the service of the monuments (themselves becoming ruins) they have built.
This work is part of a practice which is often about the process of finding or selecting an ‘image’. The quarry is interesting as its’ ‘image’ is produced in response to the geology of the site. It is an earth and stone factory with a negative solidity that appeals, holes that never end, that always hit rock.
The following text is part of response by writer Lizzie Lloyd to the exhibition: Augmented Geology, 09.06.17 - 08.07.17, KARST, Plymouth
0.4 This is the situation.
We are taken to a quarry, the site of simultaneous destruction and construction, to watch the compression of rock through the heat induced expansion of sand – glass. But the longer we look, rock’s apparently inert obduracy begins to morph under the pressure of our sustained attention. Like metamorphic rock, the quarry is pressed upon with insistence: sliding foliates of transparent, coloured and frosted glass glide across our field of vision. We don’t see it, we don’t realise it’s happening at first not until, until, with some delay, the distortions drag upon seams in the rock, warping them in ways we know cannot be true. Though modified, filtered, it is nevertheless true.
These low-tech intrusions of colour and surface undulations, see the world of solid rock ooze, slipping across our retina – liquefying foci and depths of field – returning them to their molten prehistoric states. Rock travels like bodies and language and looks; Robert Smithson knew this too.