There is humour in Bookish, notably in a piece by Niall de Buitléar. He spent time in the Boole Library in University College Cork, meticulously trawling the volumes for found objects. The result is the Found Bookmark Project, a collection of things which people have used as bookmarks and have little in common aside from being flat.

After so much sombre reworking of meaningful cover images and miscellaneous pieces of careful conceptualism, de Buitlear’s piece is a reminder of the real life of books. It points us back to readers, without whom they are just lifeless assemblies of ink and paper. It offers us an intriguing glance into the lives of these anonymous people, with their shopping lists, holy pictures and letters of complaint.

By embracing the human aspect, de Buitlear enlarges interface between books and art. The rest of the show maps the territory with careful attention to detail but the Found Bookmark Project offers us a new port of entry into it.

Review of Bookish by Gemma Carroll from the Circa website

Review of Launch / Making Do by Tim Scott for the Circa website

Text by Peter Richards for my first solo show at the Lab, Feb 2008

When an artist elects to use found objects in their work, how much of the histories of those objects find their way into the work? Does a seemingly abstract sculptural form, created from hundreds of bookies' biros become infused with the resonances of gambling, faith, hope, and loss? Does collecting and collating these distill the resonances? Or does their migration from useful, useable objects to art object translate their meaning also?

De Buitléar is interested in these questions, and also in the arbitrary nature of the objects' discovery and re-presentation. Writing about the work, Peter Richards quotes Victor Burgin to point out “the arbitrariness of concepts of art... has a positive social function.” Art's ability to play with the fixties of identity and history, and the meanings acquired through purpose and usage is the liberating thing here. Meanwhile, the artist's own miniature origami forests of trees, or villages of paper that arise from red plastic crates seem to suggest a hopeful note of useful fantasy too.

Despite the potential for the obsessional in his work (hundreds, thousands of objects gathered and laid out), there is a fluidity to the constructions and arrangements that makes space for beauty in these fascinating works.

More press here

Articles Written By Me

Interchangeable Points of Orientation, a report on Open Spaces for the March - April 2009 issue of the Visual Artist's Newsheet

What's the Story? a report on a talk by Fiona Whelan & Rialto Youth Project participants at The LAB for the March - April 2009 issue of the Visual Artist's Newsheet