CONFIDENTAL
GRACE O’LEARY
FOUND OBJECTS:
Led Lights, Inkjet – Duratran
2022
Confidential
Confidential is a series of light boxes created from found materials collected within a hidden urban void site, situated along the outskirts of Dublin City.
This void site has become a portal suspended between alternate realms; a false utopian future and a neglected dystopian present but a metamorphosis is occurring, one which will soon emerge.
Lingering in a seemingly perpetual liminal space, living species are reclaiming their place, engulfing, submerging and decaying artefacts within a haunted landscape which marks the trace of a destructive human presence. Through digital photographic processes flora, debris, ash and soil from where these exhibited artefacts were removed are represented as mutations conjured within this urban portal. Their appearance resembles that of x-ray scans but of an otherworldly being.
Artworks: Haunted by Default, Confidential, Hijacked
GRACE
O’LEARY
Grace O’Leary’s practice explores tropes of failure and chance which occur in our otherwise considered and planned urban landscapes. Constantly drawn to explorations along the outskirts of Dublin City through analogue and digital photographic processes Grace documents and observe’s the effect of both human and non-human activity among sites and architecture which are neglected or seemingly forgotten.
Rising to ruin these structures and their artefacts symbolise both literally and figuratively the failure of our neoliberal
political systems. Yet through their very failure, these physical manifestations have the power to reveal unheralded
potentials of the past, present and future through the portals which they as ruin conjure. Through experimental processes, Grace seeks to push the work back and forth between; negative and positive, lightness and darkness, utopian and dystopian, attempting to revel within the realms of these portals conjured evoking alternative readings of the worlds in which we do/and have potential to inhabit.
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