A pile of old clothes that tears into the fabric of life

Composite blocks of discarded clothing, vacant commercial properties as art space, and overturned cars – these artists are tuned into modern realities, writes AIDAN DUNNE

Other-stuff Catherine Delaney

The Lab, Foley Street, Dublin Until April 21

Shoot the Tiger

Prettyvacant group show

Unit 3, James Joyce Street, Dublin Run concluded

Luminous Flux

Andreas Kindler von Knobloch

Oonagh Young Gallery, 1 James Joyce Street, Dublin Until April 14

CATHERINE Delaney graduated from NCAD in 1984 and since then has followed a tirelessly exploratory, unpredictable artistic path.

She is the daughter of one of Ireland’s most renowned 20th-century sculptors, the late Edward Delaney, and early in his career, her father was instrumental in establishing traditional sculptural techniques, based around the central role of the foundry, in Ireland. Latterly, he embraced metal constructions. She, on the other hand, studied at a time when sculpture had opened out dramatically. Sculptors were free to employ any approach they liked, including installation, film, video, photography, social interventions, or even text, over and above the traditional making of objects.

Catherine Delaney did not reject traditional technical sculptural skills. Fill, a public artwork in Ballymun and one of her best-known pieces, consists of a huge expanse of cast aluminium, and her installation The Bridge is a monumental object. But she hasn’t tied herself to a particular technique or material, and has worked very fruitfully with other, radically different means, including site-specific installation, photography and, now, her open collaborative project, Other-stuff at The Lab.

Other-stuff follows on from the first instalment of the Pile project, in the Solstice Arts Centre in Navan in 2010, and, less directly but significantly, from an earlier collaborative work, Inside-Outside in Baltinglass, Co Wicklow, in 2007-2008. One strand of that work consisted of an excellent series of photographs of the derelict St Joseph’s Convent in the town, a series that now stands as symbolising Ireland at a point of implosion. Another, beautifully lyrical strand drew on the once-thriving textile printing industry of Stratford-on-Slaney, situating abstracted textile patterns in the open and allowing them to disappear over time.

Visit The Lab between now and April 21st and you’ll find you’ve wandered into what seems like a huge used-clothing warehouse, with piles and bound bales of clothes filling most of the available space, stacked up in mountainous heaps. There’s an industrial, businesslike feeling to it all, and it also makes for a striking visual spectacle. The context is different, but the general idea inevitably recalls French artist Christian Boltanski who, since the mid-1980s, has used masses of discarded clothing in installations dealing with memory and loss. Boltanski tapped into the distinct, at times pathetic, at times disturbing aura of old clothes, the way they powerfully evoke human presence through its absence. His Jewish heritage, more explicitly specified in other of his works, suggested the abandoned clothing and possessions of those who perished in concentration camps during the Holocaust, although he pointed out that he was not only referring to the Holocaust.

In using discarded clothing en masse Delaney risks venturing into this highly charged territory, although there are many other resonances to what she does. Certainly the innumerable items of clothing comes across as the uneasy, slightly forlorn residue of those who once owned and wore them, even though there is, more than likely, nothing more sinister than sheer disposability at the root of their appearance in The Lab. Once you start thinking of disposability, the notion of waste comes to mind, especially given the conspicuous consumption that characterised the years of the Celtic Tiger. Recycling, via charity organisations and charity and vintage stores, is now a huge and rather problematic part of the retail commercial landscape in Ireland and elsewhere. While the artist invited contributions from the public as collaborators, the accumulated clothing will eventually find its way to charities and, who knows, you may end up buying part of the exhibition way down the line.

The sheer number of individual items, their myriad, intermingled colours, textures and sizes, becomes impossible to assimilate and you start to see it all as composite blocks, compressed and tied together by plastic tape. This leads us to the other main artistic point of reference: post-minimalism. While the composite blocks of coloured fabric become parts of a vast composite, the complex emotional and other associations of the fragmentary material thwart any possibility of us viewing the overall work as a single, autonomous, abstract object.

Events scheduled throughout the run of Other-stuff have explored or will explore many of the implicit associations, including local history with reference to the clothing trade, from manufacturing to recycling. Details are available at other-stuff.ie.

JUST AROUND the corner from The Lab, Prettyvacant occupied a premises at Unit 3 James Joyce Street for the last fortnight with a group exhibition, Shoot the Tiger. Prettyvacant are artist and curator Louise Marlborough and Philip Rowley. In 2009 they came up with the idea of co-opting some of the numerous vacant commercial properties as temporary arts venues. They’ve managed to stage an ongoing series of exhibitions, many of which, by virtues of both their locations and their content, have offered a commentary on Ireland’s current ills and their possible cures.

Shoot the Tiger included Eilis Murphy’s book Roll Call, an elegantly made, wood-bound volume consisting of an alphabetical listing of Ireland’s ghost estates. With a light touch, Aoife Flynn’s collages drew parallels between the utopian architecture of Soviet Russia and such abandoned flagships of the boom as the unfinished Anglo-Irish HQ building in the Docklands. Noel Noblett’s photographs from his Industrial Island series are of fragmentary, run-down landscapes. Blaithin Quinn’s Paperwork, on the other hand, a set of folded paper modules, seemed to offer hope that we might yet reshape the world around us.

A SIMILAR ASPIRATION is articulated in Luminous Flux at the Oonagh Young Gallery. Andreas Kindler von Knobloch is probably best known for part of his NCAD degree show that involved a number of people over-turning a car. The action, titled Carturn, was re-staged for his current exhibition, which includes what is accurately described as “a deftly engineered yet DIY enclosure” with a stroboscopic mechanism inside.

Von Knobloch doesn’t see the overturning of the car as a negative act but as emblematic of the potential of co-operative social action. Likewise, the “immersive sensory experience” afforded by the light construction in the gallery is indicative of inner transformative potential. Like Delaney, he sees art as a means not only of interpreting but shaping and changing the world.