The Forgotten Works

2012 / Project Arts Centre, Dublin/ Temporary Commission

The Forgotten Works, 2012

Project Arts Centre

Funded by Arts Council of Ireland

https://projectartscentre.ie/event/the-forgotten-works/

 Timber, bitumen, screws

 Ruth E Lyons

Curated by Tessa Giblin

Black, bright and amorphous, Ruth E. Lyons’ major new public commission, The Forgotten Works, appears to pull and push the exterior facade of Project Arts Centre. A shape-shifter by day and an imploding mass by night, Lyons’ large-scale timber construction creeps across the building, moving in a disarray of bitumen-coated struts from the balcony towards the pedestrian street below. The Forgotten Works is an extension of themes embodied in a previous work by Lyons, titled Amphibious Sound, and exhibited in the gallery space of Project Arts Centre as part of Conjuring for Beginners, this year’s major Visual Arts summer show. Amphibious Sound is an expansive mass of black Neoprene sewn together to form a large blanket, which swarmed and rippled across the gallery floor, like a foil or skin defining the division between two realms. Similarly, The Forgotten Works acts as both an in-between space and a threat, its timber clusters seeming to engulf itself, and the building. Taking its title from a location in the novella In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan (1968), Lyons’ thinking behind both of these works lies in a fascination for that which exists at the base of all social formations; ideas of dark matter, carbon, mining sites, potentialities for light, imploding energies and creative dissolutions. The Forgotten Works is a work in conflict: a generative and destructive force, an entanglement of darkness and light, and a conjuring of form and formlessness. As an in-between space, it is both a beginning and an end, and a non-space from which matter seems to rise.

The public installation is a work in three phases. It is part-sculpture, part-performance, with the construction process integral to the work itself. On completion, The Forgotten Works exists in constant flux, shifting as darkness falls, its black density both encasing and emitting a stark pulsating light from its nebulous depths. These changes in form seek to harness the imagination of an incidental audience, set amidst the public space of the city.

This installation marks an ambitious departure for Ruth E. Lyons in terms of scale and location. Through the work the artist sets out to further develop a practice that engages with the public beyond the confines of the gallery. Furthermore, with a practice that has been previously rooted in the rural, Lyons’ brings a new, complex affecting of the urban through a dynamic public process of installation and its dramatic outcomes.