Dreamtime Ireland
Visual Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow
★★★★☆
I first encountered Sean Lynch around this time last year, at the Banana Accelerationism exhibition at the Complex gallery in Dublin. A collaboration with Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, that show was notable for the degree of interdependence it fostered. The artists abstained from naming individual pieces, encouraging the visitor to experience the overall composition, much as one would experience instruments in an orchestral score, aware of each player only as part of the symphony as a whole.
Lynch’s sensitivity to the ensemble-like effects of artworks appears to be an essential characteristic of his artistic vision, evident here in this blockbuster show at Visual Carlow. Curated by Lynch, Dreamtime Ireland features dozens of artworks, ranging across painting, sculpture, film, photography, sound and even video game, and featuring contributions from the 1990s to the present day.
What ties this wide diversity of work together is a piquant focus on the political and social articulation of Irish nationhood. Dreamtime, let’s not forget, is the name of the well-known collection of mythological, philosophical and historical writings by the mystic John Moriarty, for whom “dreamtime” was a mode of cultural exploration, a means to heal the culture of our present day, by re-engaging with and interpreting the culture of our past.
In line with this approach, one of the most striking works in the exhibition is John Carson and Conor Kelly’s Evening Echoes, from 1993-95. An assemblage of photography, text and, crucially, sound, the work permeates every gallery space in the sprawling exhibition. The artists recorded newspaper vendors on the streets of Ireland and Britain; incomprehensible shouts, trills and cries fill Visual, creating an inchoate auditory patchwork that is somewhere between mating call and human song.
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Beyond its distinctive form, Carson and Kelly’s installation has a sociological component, powerfully evoking what is lost in our era of digital media.
Raymond Griffin’s wooden sculpture Reconstruction of the Christmas Crib at Dublin Airport in 1964 (from 2025) is another reminder of the recent past, though its commentary is more explicitly critical. The work is a faithful refabrication of a Nativity scene created by the artisan Fergus O’Farrell. The scene consists of minimalist shapes: by divesting the characters of their personal, human traits, O’Farrell sought to elicit Catholicism’s articles of faith – God, heaven, eternal life, the Messiah, forgiveness and redemption – more directly.
His effort ran aground when Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, displeased by the abstract forms, ordered its removal. An editorial from the Irish Independent accompanying the piece criticises the “insufficient qualities” of the Nativity “to constitute sacred art.”
Other notable works that employ a sharp critical lens are Léann Herlihy’s autofictional bureaucratic odyssey The Long Internecine Quarrel, Paul Gregg’s fascinating Reconnaisance and Delivery (Waterford Parachute Project), which features a curator being grilled on daytime television for her gallery’s support of public art, and Namaco’s epic DIY video game about the Irish housing crisis, Mega Dreoilín.
Dreamtime Ireland is at Visual Carlow until Sunday, August 31st, 2025
