Extract From Circa Review
Overflow • Undercurrent • Exhibition & Installation
Model Arts Centre, Sligo
Level Head comprises two vertically wall-mounted basins holding backlit transparencies of rippling water. The title makes reference to the two lobes of the brain, the vessel of creative energy, the “water” taking on a radiant energy. Additionally the ripples and bubbles hint at the biological potential – growth, evolution – contained in the medium, the two sinks together echoing a single cell in the process of division. Overflow comprises an enamelled cast iron bath broken into pieces and laid out as an exploded view, while on its surface is etched a life-sized depiction of the human circulatory system, similarly fractured. Parallels are drawn between water and blood, both channelled life forces, with the title an allusion to their latent power.
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In Leap, a multi-stranded copper wire is stretched across a room, one end projecting from a wall-mounted steel water tank, the other apparently piercing the opposite wall some twenty metres away. The glass surface of the tank suggests a dark reservoir within, the wire seems to explode out from it – a metaphorical leap of the imagination from the reservoir of the mind. Feed continues the theme of thought, an arrangement of parallel vertical steel tubes studded with porcelain fuse caps, each housing a small photographic transparency of the top of a person’s head. The spiral whorls of hair suggest flow, and by inference creativity or thought, yet the formal structure seems to allow for little in the way of originality or freedom, each head being “fed” by the and in turn “feeding” the rigid system in which it is contained.