The Visitors
14 December 2024 – 9 February 2025
Installation views, The Visitors, Butler Gallery, 2024. Photographs by Ros Kavanagh courtesy of Butler Gallery.
Exploring loss and preservation amid scientific research to improve native woodland, The Visitors at Butler Gallery was a playful yet critical lament on Ireland’s built and natural heritage. Working with scavenged materials, many gathered in the wake of storms or human activity, the artworks interacted like a set—a room for visitors—invited and invasive—ready to come apart for the next act.
Animating a scene change between the domestic and global, the decorative finishes of a house were recreated using the evergreen protagonists of its garden – plants known to steal daylight from others and predicted to prevail in the face of climate change. Among these, Ivy – the ubiquitous underminer of walls and trees which, at some point, is also essential in stabilising their rotting remains. Salvaged from walls toppled in a series of storms, it was used to dye silk, along with Rhododendron and Cherry laurel, whose leaves inspired ornamental stucco made from pulped lab coats. A nod to the historic estates currently hosts to the gene banks and labs of researchers of tree improvement programmes, the cotton stucco also recalls the role that such estates once had in introducing invasives.
Combining natural materials with the ducting, hazard tape, and polypropylene ropes used to demarcate access to sites of clear-felling and construction, surfaces were veneered with paper made from the remains of felled and fallen trees, and rubbings from a ruin and mass-produced door. Translating impermanence and complicity, artworks embodied the concept of a door or ‘openings’ – the weather events, anthropogenic activity, ecological gaps, and legal loopholes – which create the conditions for thresholds to be crossed and for invasive species to take hold.
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.