Feeling your way; holding you here

Lloyd, Lizzie

Abstract

Exhibition Catalogue to accompany the Ireland at Venice exhibition presenting the work of Niamh O'Malley at Venice Biennale 2022

The poise and aesthetic restraint of Niamh O’Malley’s work holds you, but at arm's length. There is a dissembling single-mindedness to it that obscures a poetic multiplicity. It is quietly assured, as if knowing its own mind, but something about it leaves exposed a chink of irresolution. Congregations of shaped glass panes, metal, wood, stone, and the odd LED screen at once impede, support, and intimate. I wonder where to begin. I reach out, feeling for traction, circling, casting around for points of entry, anchorage, something to hold onto. To help find my bearings, I look to language to translate O’Malley’s structures and forms, but before long my sentences become contorted, stumbling over a succession of inelegant qualifying clauses and modifiers. I gather myself, beginning again.

• Publication Date: Apr 23, 2022
• Deposit Date: Oct 10, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 19, 2023
• Pages: 41-46
• Book Title: Gather
• ISBN: 9781399918756
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10020435
• Publisher URL: https://www.thelibraryproject.ie/products/gather-niamh-omalley
• Related Public URLs: https://www.templebargallery.com/exhibitions