LAST ACT

Exhibition at Limerick City Gallery, 2024

This exhibition includes a large scale three channel video installation in LCGA’s South Gallery and three related works in the Ante Room – all reference the climate crises.

An illusionistic ‘entrance’ made to scale with the contradictory title EXIT seems to offer a passageway forward into some uncertain space beyond, yet it’s not possible to go through. The work is a metaphor for where we find ourselves in this time of climate urgency – there is no exit, no quick fix, no easy way out.

The video installation focusses mostly on weather events with real footage of drought, flooding, wildfires and melting ice slowly building towards a wide screen shot of dark engulfing waters. Weather imagery is bookended by seemingly unrelated sequences of empty industrial spaces; doors and shutters opening to blank whiteness and closing to a final blackness – these reference our industrial past and present suggesting the role industry has played in the onset of climate change. The pace is calibrated towards slowness and sound is as important as visual imagery. Rhona Clarke’s music, created especially for the installation works as vocal commentator. The voices are those of the astonishing State Choir LATVIJA. Overlaying the vocal layer are other sounds; drum beats and a final tolling bell conveying urgency and marking time.