VISUAL is pleased to present Cinders of the Wreck, the first exhibition in Ireland by Dominique White.

VISUAL’s Main Gallery holds four large sculptures, that can be read as both individual works and as a complete installation. These are drawn from an ongoing series examining the myth of the Hydra. Variations of the Hydra appear in many ancient religions, though it is most familiar to a western audience as a many-headed monster of Greek and Roman mythology. In this telling, it resided in the lake of Lerna in ancient Greece, where it guarded an entrance to the Underworld until it was slain by Hercules. Of the myth’s multiple interpretations and endings, White references one in which the immortal head of the Hydra is buried underneath an enormous rock, living on, unkillable.

This foundational story is enlarged with thinking from other sources, most significantly that looking at the concept of hydrarchy. This term refers to various social and practical workings of some maritime societies, where people from all over the world formed coherent social structures on board ships. Some were home to egalitarian organising principles that allowed marginalised or abused figures such as sailors, slaves and migrants equality at sea. These existed in opposition to the fleets of nation-states that led Atlantic trade including slave-trading from the 16^th century on. This trade was integral to the formation and maintenance of power on land, and was fiercely defended against pirates or buccaneers. Studies of hydrarchy positioned these as equivalent to the Hydra, to be slain, conquered. White suggests an inversion of this idea, to cast the apparatus of the state, and its associated evils, as the unkillable monster.

Materials and forms in White’s work are evocative of nautical equipment and shipwrecks: old, frayed ropes, rusted iron, netting and sails. In its evocation of destroyed infrastructure, the works reference a past violence, but also are materially delicate and deteriorating; kaolin clay that disintegrates and spreads, and the rust that slowly eats away at iron harpoons. This is contradicted by the richness of other materials such as mahogany, though they all provoke thoughts of historically where and how these valuable foreign materials came together, and the labour that forged them into vessels and tools.

Exhibitions concurrently on view with Cinders of the Wreck look at landscapes as a place that hold stories and contribute to identities and livelihoods – this exhibition considers the sea as a repository of myth “boundless and borderless”, a site of histories both real and imagined.

-

the Collapsed, the Overthrown, yet ever Insatiable (2022)

burnt mahogany, cast iron, forged iron, damaged rope

The Long Emancipation (2022)

burnt mahogany, cast iron, forged iron, damaged rope, raffia, sisal, kaolin clay, null sails

Can We Be Known Without Being Hunted (2022)

burnt mahogany, cast iron, forged iron, damaged rope, raffia, sisal, kaolin clay, null sails

Redemption (2022)

burnt mahogany, cast iron, forged iron, damaged rope

-

Dominique White (b. UK) mostly lives in Marseille (FR) and Essex (GB) and works nomadically. Recent solo and duo exhibitions include: Deadweight at Whitechapel Gallery (GB) (2024), Destruction of Order at veda (IT) (2024 and Dominique White and Alberta Whittle: Sargasso Sea at ICA Philadelphia (US) (2024).

Recent group exhibitions include: La Haute Note Jaune at Fondation Vincent van Gogh (FR) (2024-5), AMONG THE INVISIBLE JOINS: Works from the Enea Righi Collection at Museion (IT) (2024-5) and Phantom Sculpture at Warwick Arts Centre (GB) (2023-4).

White was the winner of the 9th edition of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women (GB/IT) (2022- 2024) and CURA magazine has chosen her as one of the most significant artists of the current generation. She was also awarded the Foundwork Artist Prize at the beginning of 2023 and was in residency at Sagrada Mercancía (CL), Triangle France – Astérides (FR) and La Becque (CH) in 2020 and 2021.