Solo Exhibition
Pallas Projects/Studios
Dublin, Ireland
2024
The Land and Others, Including the Dead is a site-specific installation that deals with grief, loss and the ritual vernacular architecture that embeds them in the landscape. This work reflects on soft power and the role of ritual as care. Viewing ritual as a form of mutual aid that exists outside hierarchical institutional structures, the exhibition seeks to reclaim ritual as a counter to the destructive power of racial capitalism.
Inspired by grottos, shrines and other folk ritual interventions created and maintained by local communities in Japan and Ireland, the interaction of hard and soft ritual object forms in the exhibition points to the community care embodied in ritual practice, recasting the soft as strong and protective, feminine and queer. Woven thresholds hang in the space, serving as frames through which to view moving image works. Found materials and objects collected from the Irish landscape, both rural and urban, help create a narrative that grounds and situates the audience in this ritualised space.
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There is a tree in the Phoenix Park that once held a plaque that read:
“On the morning of his last day, April 6th, 2020, Aonghus Cheevers stopped here to watch the deer. He was a brilliant, hilarious and beautiful man. A loving husband. A caring friend. He is profoundly loved and missed every day.”
The plaque is no longer there, robbed, one supposes, for the brass, but the tree is there and every year since his death, white hyacinths, planted at the base of the tree in his memory, start to bloom only to be eaten by the deer that he was so taken with on the day of his death. I think Aonghus is pleased by this. (Aonghus’s ghost shrugs his shoulders. “Nature,” he says and chuckles to himself)