LAST ACT
Exhibition at Limerick City Gallery, 2024
This exhibition includes a large scale three channel video installation, sculptural works and a display of photographic stills. All works relate to 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.
Deep within a square box is an illuminated image of eyes looking upwards. They are the eyes the young, the youngest among them only a baby. These are not people of power, they are not the decision makers, yet it is they who will live with the consequences of every choice and decision made by the adults they depend on.
Black Book – all and nothing started out as an actual printed book about human communication; title not revealed. The book was dismantled, its pages saturated with opaque black ink, then rebound. In the context of the exhibition this work suggests that we are beyond words in relation to climate urgency.
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. Working with the astonishing State Choir LATVIJA Rhona Clarke has created a vocal commentary, not so much through the latin text of the Dies Irae but in the music itself. Overlaying the vocal layer are other sounds; drum beats and a final tolling bell conveying urgency and marking time.

EXIT
wall piece in five painted sections, 2024

We Will Inherit the Earth
lightbox, 2024

We Will Inherit the Earth
lightbox image, 2024

Black Book – all and nothing
book saturated with black ink, 2019

LAST ACT
installation detail, Limerick City Gallery, 2024

LAST ACT
installation detail, Limerick City Gallery, 2024

LAST ACT
video still, Limerick City Gallery, 2024

LAST ACT
video still, Limerick City Gallery, 2024 “ – who shall stem the black tide coming in? “ Summer Night, Elizabeth Bowen
