Found in Collection

VISUAL is pleased to present Found in Collection, an exhibition of sculpture, photography, moving image and drawing by Orla O’Byrne.

Found in Collection brings together the materials and histories of several disparate sites; the Crawford Gallery of Art and St. Fin Barre's Cathedral in Cork; the marble quarries of Carrara, Italy; the Bay of Biscay as seen in a glass lantern slide. Focusing on overlooked and undiscovered corners, O'Byrne uncovers different ways of marking and excavating time both geological and human.

The exhibition is anchored by Sunset, Bay of Biscay. A digital scan of a glass lantern slide, the sunset slowly pulses in and out of view, growing so dark as to be indiscernible before burning out in glowing white. Found while O’Byrne was on an artist residency in the Crawford College of Art, the original slide was mixed up with others in an archive box, forgotten for decades, obsolete yet still arresting in its beauty.

Two large drawings on the opposite wall replicate the image of the sunset, translated to unfixed charcoal drawing, recording scratches on the slide and wispy trails of cloud. Disjointed geometric lines point to the drawing being done in stages, uncovering a small section at a time so as not to undo its beauty through over-examination. A companion to the original image, Sky One Day is drawn from a photograph taken outside the Crawford, connecting the near and distant through a shared recording and transcribing technique.

The trace of the artist’s hands appear in two chunks of Carrara marble, a material prized for millennia and extracted from over 650 quarries in the region. O’Byrne’s pieces are offcuts, discarded and washed down from the quarries before resting in a now dried-up riverbed. The plinths that hold the sculptures are painted a custom blue mixed by the artist, and reflecting the blue of the walls in the Canova casts room in the Crawford gallery. The collection of casts as both facsimiles of artworks, teaching aids, and arguably an installation in their own right, are here connected to O’Byrne’s parallel interest in the journey and transmutation of materials and objects through a change of site, a change of treatment, a change of view. 

Change of view is investigated in its own right in five film negatives illustrating the phenomenon of binocular inversion; an object appearing both one way, and another. These moulds of hands, used to model sculptures used in the carving work on St. Fin Barre’s Cathedral, sometimes appear to be rising out of the moulds, a shadow of the original sitter. Nearby, a photograph of an everyday, now largely obsolete tool; a hook on a pole to open and close a shutter or a window. Years of daily use, being replaced in corners of rooms, turns the metal hook into the author of a slow accumulative drawings on walls. The marks become a way of marking time, and create an unexpected portrait of place, transported here to another corner, another room.

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Orla O’Byrne is an artist, researcher, and curator of St Fin Barre’s Cathedral in Cork City, Ireland. 

She holds an MA in Art & Process from MTU Crawford, Cork, and is a PhD candidate, writing her dissertation on artists working with archival materials. Her previous awards include The Lavitt Gallery Student of the Year, the CIT Registrar’s Prize and The Valerie Gleeson Bursary Award. She teaches life drawing at MTU Crawford in Cork and she is chair of the board at Backwater Artist’s Group, where she has been a studio member since 2020.

Orla works across a variety of media and methods such as drawing, photography and sculptural installation. She uses chalk, charcoal and plaster and adopts an experimental approach, constantly exploring and testing the limits of these and other materials. She also uses analogue photographic methods. The ideas behind Orla’s work come from the overlooked histories of specific sites or artefacts and she has a particular curiosity about what’s concealed within the vastness of the institutional archive.