High Light

For some time I have been interested in the North Bank Light House in Dublin Bay. I would love to rebuild it on the roof of an apartment building on the south quays in Dublin. It would become a two room residency in the sky housing artists, scientists and all types of people with an interest in sustainable energy for month long periods to develop their practice. The structure would be powered by a wind turbine and solar panels and would light up every half an hour casting its beam across the city.

The Liffey Quays, A Ribbon Of Green: Fergal McCarthy at TEDxDUBLIN

I was asked to talk at TedX Dublin at the Grand Canal Theatre last September (organised by the Science Gallery). I spoke about an idea I have to construct an 8km long linear park along the banks of the Liffey in Dublin. One lane of traffic at both sides of the river could be removed and the resulting space would become a walkway with trees, planting, playgrounds, markets, skateparks and many other attractions. The park would connect with the boardwalks and the campshires in the docklands unifying all the space around the Liffey as an incredible amenity for Dubliners and visitors to the city.

Word River

I have an ongoing fascination with the beauty and limitations of language. For several years I have kept lists of words that appeal aesthetically but elusively resist assimilation into my vocabulary.

I love the words pathos and hubris but despite repeated leafing through the dictionary I can never quite remember their meaning after a day or two.

 I deal primarily in images, I find them a lot easier to process than language. I feel like I never quite manage to satisfactorily construct sentences. Beautifully descriptive words swim around my head but rarely make it into my vernacular. After reading a restaurant review by AA Gill or a critique of an exhibition by Peter Schjeldahl (The NewYorker) I find myself jotting down all the exotic words in the article that jump out like veristic, ersatz and cadavar.

This practice has become almost obsessive, my desk is covered with an ever growing mound of words scribbled on the backs of envelopes and on any scrap of paper to hand. 

Much of my recent work has centred on the Liffey. Behan said that Joyce had made the river 'The Ganges of the literary world'. I began to think that it would be interesting to make my next Liffey based project about words and marry these two seemingly unconnected strands of my practice. I hope to stencil hundreds of metre high words into the grime of the Liffey walls using a powerhose to form a 1km long linear stripe of text visible from the quays.

The words will be sourced from Joyce's Dubliners (another Liffey obsessive) and this time members of the public will be invited to join me on a personal tour of the intervention in a rowing boat. I am currently in discussions to try to make Word River happen in 2013.

Every Word I've Ever Loved

Pathos, Hubris, Euphonious, Juggernaut, Zealous, Aphorism, Protean, Pithy and Plutocrat are all examples of the types of word that attract me on some sensory/aesthetic level but elude me as I can never quite remember their meaning or absorb them into my vocabulary. I write down any word I like the sound of in notebooks, on the back of envelopes, on my hand and collate them in an ever expanding list on my laptop. This has been going on for over ten years and the list now runs to several hundred. I was recently asked to make a text based piece informed by this habit for a group exhibition in Dublin. Using thick, black watercolor I painted 640 of these words on to 16 sheets of paper and mounted them on a wall. The concept is about to be expanded on a much larger scale on the Liffey this September.

The Swimmer at Eyebeam NYC

The Swimmer, a film I made with director Nicky Gogan and StillFilms is currently being shown at Eyebeam, a gallery in Chelsea, NewYork (www.eyebeam.org). The film was originally shown in the Science Gallery, Dublin as part of The Surface Tension exhibition in 2011 and this whole show has now been shipped across the Atlantic and is on view until late July.

Chandeliers

I was in Melbourne last week and in a great bookshop on Collins Street I found a book of interviews between Ai WeiWei and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Ai WeiWei's fame has transcended the artworld (especially of late given his problems with the Chinese Government/police force) but beyond the sunflower seed installation in the Turbine Hall and his project at Documenta 12 which brought 1001 Chinese people to Kassel I'm not that aware of the rest of his work. I was interested to read about his enormous chandelier which is hung at ground level (shown at Mary Boone amongst other locations), I wonder if it somehow prompted Terence Koh's extraordinary black chandelier which is patinated and embellished with a bizarre and somewhat scary array of materials (paint, lollipops, vegetable matter, human and horse hair, mineral oil, rope from a ship found after midnight, glass shards, stones, artist’s blood and shit). My wife just bought a photograph of a chandelier by the Irish artist Elaine Byrne which feels deliberately overexposed and takes on the flat quality of a painting, it's beautiful and it's nice to walk into your house to find something new on the wall.


Ai WeiWei 'Chandelier' 236" x 165" x 165"



































Terence Koh 'These Decades That We Never Sleep, Black Light' 2004

Pallas Periodical Review

A 'No Man's Land' print was included in this brilliant group show at Pallas Projects on Dominic St, Dublin 1.

Pallas Periodical Review
Selected by Ruth Carroll, Carl Giffney, Mark Cullen & Gavin Murphy

19/11/11—17/12/11

David Beattie, Morton Feldman, Bea McMahon, Seán Shanahan, John Smith, Mark Clare, Maeve Curtis, Gillan Lawler, Aidan Lynam, Fergal McCarthy, Not Abel, Cecily Brennan, Carol Anne Connolly, Emma Houlihan, Andreas Von Knobloch, Nevin Lahart, Joseph Coveney, Michelle Considine, Barbara Knezevic, Colm Mac Athlaoich, Maggie Madden

An artwork, like a book is not made up of individual words on a page (or images on a screen), each of which with a meaning, but is instead “caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences.” Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge


Pallas Periodical Review is not a group exhibition per se, it is a discursive action, with the gallery as a magazine-like layout of images that speak (The field talking to itself). An exhibition as resource, in which we invite agents within the field to engage with what were for them significant moments, practices, works, activity, objects, nodes within the network.


To coincide with our new gallery space, refinement of our name and identity, and highlighting our dual role as a programming and resource organisation, Pallas Projects/Studios presents Pallas Periodical Review – a unique, yearly survey of Irish contemporary art practices. Structured as an editorial review with a critical and discursive position, it will look at commercial gallery shows, museum exhibitions, artist-led and independent projects, publishing, and curatorial practices.

The format has PP/S invite two peers – artists, writers, educators, curators – at the beginning of each year to review and subsequently nominate a number of art practices, which at the end of that year will be selected via an editorial meeting. Such a review-type exhibition within Irish art practice will act to revisit, be a reminder, a critical appraisal and consolidation of ideas and knowledge within the field of contemporary Irish art.