VISUAL is pleased to present Shadow the Solar Trail, an exhibition of new work by Richard Proffitt.

Proffitt’s practice is marked by a wide use of different media to realise ambitious and complex installations. While still working with a wide range of material, Proffitt has recently turned to painting as a primary medium. This exhibition creates an immersive environment through sculpture, sound, moving image, to create an installation in which to show and contextualise these recent painted works.

These paintings, and the installation as a whole, suggest a story of a mysterious scene or event, perhaps just occurred or about to happen. In the centre of the gallery, a raft made of scrap material and containing various votive, or shrine-like assemblages sits, surrounded by drifts of sand and ash. The large interior window blocking the doorway of the gallery is papered over with environmental-movement fliers and zines. A selection of paintings and a film cover the walls, the film a looped record of a seemingly purposeless devotional act, erecting a Christmas tree in a desolate landscape. A Christmas tree also appears in the central sculptural assemblage, acting as a query of which social constructs may have been forgotten, survived, or changed in this strange new or parallel world in which the exhibition places us.

Artist Biography

Richard Proffitt, born 1985, Liverpool, UK. Lives and works in Dublin.

Richard Proffitt's work in painting, sculpture, sound, and video is inspired by a stream of consciousness recollection of histories, memories, dreams, fact, and fiction, and driven by an interest in found material that consists of thematically sourced objects, paper ephemera, junk, and sound recordings. The works often combine to create immersive, otherworldly, site-responsive installation works that evoke places of worship one may imagine existing in an intermingling cosmic universe of esoteric folk religions, the bedroom of a teenage loner, a spaghetti western and the remote habitat of a psychedelic death cult.

Recent exhibitions include A Memory Circular, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin, 2021, Little Did They Know: EVA International 2020-21, Limerick City, 2021, The Museum of Ancient History, UCD, Dublin, 2020, and Display, Link and Cure, The Complex, Dublin, 2019.

A newly commissioned text by John O’Donoghue explores the themes and ideas within Shadow the Solar Trail, and is available for visitors to take away.