The Dream Pool Intervals (Assemble II)
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Installation views from The Dream Pool Intervals, solo exhibition at The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, curated by Michael Dempsey, March - September 2025.

This body of abstract prints and objects approaches the archive through ideas of absence and erasure. In Untitled (Surface #6) a found photograph is obscured with bitumen, while the Picture series depicts the reverse sides of early photographic prints. Reworked in places by hand and set in custom brass frames that echo margins and book spines, they resemble fragments from a future archive where only traces of photographs remain. These works shift the photograph’s meaning away from record and evidence, towards the symbolic and speculative - shaped less by what was preserved than by the gaps of memory and loss.

The floor-based installation Assemble II presents a ritualistic sequence
of found ceramic vessels, arranged in a manner that at once suggests and confounds museological display. No longer protected by their enclosures, they appear vulnerable yet animate—objects dislodged from systems of classification and returned to a state of uncertainty. In this quiet undoing of order and preservation, the work gestures toward the instability of cultural memory and the fragile architectures through which we attempt to contain it.

The exhibition takes its title from The Dream Pool Essays (1088) by the Chinese
polymath Shen Kuo, a text that spans science, nature, and culture, and contains what is thought to be the earliest written observation of climate change.