"Performing A Translation" at the Project Space in Ormond Studios, Dublin, 25th - 28th May 2017

AsWeMaySink, Dorota Borowa, Chloe Brenan, Claire Burke, Niamh Coffey, Sarah Edmondson, Hazel Egan, Kieran Gallagher

Performing a Translation is the first exhibition of work by current members of Ormond Studios since its relocation. ‘Translation’ is a term used in geometry to describe a function that moves an object a certain distance. The object is not altered in any other way. It is not rotated, reflected or re-sized. In a translation, every point of the object must be moved in the same direction and for the same distance.

In moving from No. 6 to No. 4 Ormond Quay, Ormond Studios have performed this translation, preserving the studio as a nucleus of art-making, a place to translate, test and transform ideas. Works reflect on this geometric term in an expanded sense, interpreting translation more broadly as a paradigm of mediation that includes aesthetic, political, topographical and intertextual transformations.

This exhibition is held in conjunction with Bealtaine Festival 2017.

Documentation courtesy of Kate-Bowe O'Brien.

Wayward Fruit Tree at Ormond Studios, Dublin

Dorota Borowa, Chloe Brenan, Niamh Coffey, Nessa Darcy, Sarah Edmondson, Kieran Gallagher, Mary-Jo Gilligan, Jessica Kelly, Helen Mac Mahon and Keshet Zur

Preview 15th of September 2016, 6-8pm
Culture Night 16th of September 2016, 5-11pm
Saturday 17th of September 2016, 2-5pm

Do the books that writers don't write matter? It's easy to forget them, to assume the apocryphal bibliography must contain nothing but bad ideas, just abandoned projects, embarrassing first thoughts. It needn't be so: first thoughts are often best, cheeringly rehabilitated by third thoughts after they've been loured at by seconds. Besides, an idea isn't always abandoned because it fails some quality control test. The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all.

And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting snowflakes. What can he do about it? Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

Wayward Fruit Tree is an exhibition of work by current and past members of Ormond Studios, an artist-led space in Dublin City. Taking the above literary notion of the "reliable fruit tree" as a metaphor for artistic output, the collection of works on display reflect on this nature of art making, specifically the negotiation and communication of ideas within the context of an ongoing artistic practice. Some of the artworks represent ideas as they are in the midst of taking shape, somewhere between conception and fruition. Others are earlier works that were not exhibited publicly at the time of their making, but rather served as springboards for other thoughts. In assembling these kinds of works alongside other recently completed pieces, the exhibition hopes to articulate something of the plurality of timings and rhythms specific to each maker's practice in their shared context of a collectively run space.