Fireplace
2024
MDF, cotton lab coats, fallen ash leaves, felled ash trees, graphite, newsprint
1840mm x 1200mm x 250mm
Installed in The Visitors at Butler Gallery, 2024. Photographs by Ros Kavanagh courtesy of Butler Gallery.
Set against a painted backdrop of wall panelling in collapse, Fireplace recalls the proportions of the George II Kilkenny fossil marble chimneypiece of the Drawing Room at Castlemorris, County Kilkenny. Only ruined outbuildings remain of the original house, the 500-acre estate now managed by Coillte and home to a Teagasc Ash gene bank monitoring the tolerance and suitability of 208 genotypes from 18 European countries to Irish climatic conditions. The laurel ornamentation of the original fireplace is reduced to diamond shapes on the artwork – a reference to the shape of lesions caused by Ash dieback disease. Deliberately exposing its MDF base to create an inverse ‘decorative trim’ from the building material (a key product of Ireland’s forestry industry) the surface of the work is ‘veneered’ with paper mementos of felled and fallen remains. Handmade paper composed of the white lab coats of scientific research, Ash woodchips salvaged from a cull of trees attributed to Health & Safety, and fallen leaves gathered from the woodland loops of Castlemorris, are pasted next to frottage of its outhouse ruins.
The Visitors was developed thanks to the generous support of an Arts Council Visual Arts Bursary Award 2024, a Galway City Council Creative Practitioner Bursary 2024, with thanks to Dheeraj Rathore, Research Officer in Tree Improvement at Teagasc, and through a yearlong collaboration with Kunstverein Aughrim in 2024 made possible with the support of The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.