Dream Pool

2015 / Galway Arts Centre

Gallery text

This winter Galway Arts Centre will exhibit new work by artists Angela Fulcher and Ruth E. Lyons. ‘Unbounded’ will open at 6.00 pm on the 4th of December 2015 and will run until 16th of January 2016. The exhibition title references the limitless nature of interpretation and unrestrained manipulation of material.


Ruth E. Lyons is a Visual Artist and Co-director of The Good Hatchery. Lyons has conceived new sculptural work that sets out to create an immersive experience and bring out into the open the underground movements of material, in this case referring to the use of water as a means of displacing oil in oil-wells. The work is inspired by the writings of the Han Chinese polymathic scientist Shen Kuo, specifically his Dream Pool essays where he made the earliest known historical reference to oil which he called 'Rock Oil'. Lyons' installation of the same name, Dream Pool, is made from towering timbers that echo the lattice design of electrical pylons, and are used to suspend pools of water and oil that float overhead, with immiscible liquids creating enigmatic patterns. Stormglass, originally exhibited in Mermaid Arts Centre as part of the artist’s solo exhibition The Sea, The Sea,is similarly hinged on the curious patterns that form in liquid, but this time in the form of polished limestone and a Victorian weather predicting barometer.