NIAMH O'MALLEY

O’Malley’s sculptural installations incorporate a delicate balanceof space and object, her artwork punctuating the room withits distinctive vocabulary of steel, limestone, wood and glass.Responding thoughtfully to the dimensions and history ofthe gallery space, O’Malley’s sculptural works coalesce in apurposeful landscape of forms, acknowledging their location inher first ever US exhibition in the vibrant hum of New York City,while considering the influence of O’Malley’s upbringing on thewest coast of Ireland.

Featuring a number of new works created for the exhibition,Lightbox represents a new chapter developing on the ideasin Gather – examining the familiarity of static forms and howpeople build relationships to them, and finding the pathos ofinanimate urban objects such as the titular lightbox of the show,dimmed and containing the bones of display while capturing thepasserby in its smoky reflection. The exhibition brings togethersculptural works constructed out of familiar components, suchas wood and stone, repurposed and displayed to underscore theirmateriality. O’Malley recontextualizes overlooked objects fromdomestic windows to pavement grates, interrogates their life inan urban context, and utilizes the innate solid fragility of glassto create delicate compositions that are poised on the verge ofcollapse and destruction.

O’Malley’s recent work considers the materiality of the urbanenvironment in particular. As she navigated the city during Covidthe artist found herself more conscious of the materials andmechanisms which support and shape our lives - from drains tovents. Lightbox (2023) examines both the intention of the objectto expose and to lure, and its capacity to contain energy andpotential in its own materiality – the function of the lightbox shiftsto reflect and diffuse the world around it in its surface.

O’Malley has created several new works for the exhibitionincluding a potent new ‘shelf’ piece titled Shelf, composition,yellow (2023), a painterly work composed through layeringcolored glass to filter light in increasingly opaque or translucentportals. Objects rest against or alongside one another, creatinga composition of relational boundaries and layered dimensions.This decisive approach to space, layering and relation betweenobjects is a consistent one throughout the exhibition, making useof O’Malley’s distinctive wooden ‘parenthesis’ pieces to punctuateand give shape to the presentation as a whole.

Another glass work, Comb, yellow (2023), composed ofbeechwood and glass returns to the idea of capturing thepotential of a moment, a freezeframe in time as the fragile andrigid materials coexist in a delicate balance.

This precarious work is placed alongside the grounding influenceof Drain (2021), an undulating limestone form hewn out ofsedimentary rock, created in response to the stone paving of aDublin street. The limestone which has been perforated with longdeep cuts as if water might flow through and over it, speaks ofthe ground we walk on and the seabed it came from, porous andancient. It bears the marks of its aqueous history.

O’Malley’s restrained, observational perspective allows us toreconsider and appreciate the sculptural aspects of everydayobjects, encouraging the viewer to shift their own perspectiveand make room for the relationship between objects and themeaningful potential of material. By centering her practice aroundelemental materials, O’Malley makes our relationship to thenatural world tangible and familiar, for a moment drowning outthe buzz of urban life.