ALL FLESH

Venue: GOMA Gallery Waterford

Dates:14 October – 25 November 2023

All Flesh is a new exhibition by artist Gillian O’Shea. The official launch will take place at GOMA Waterford on Saturday 14th October from 4–6pm. All are welcome!

All Flesh is a new site specific multi-sensory textile installation and video work by Irish artist Gillian O’Shea. Through multi-layered installations sculpture, colour, film and sound merge, transporting us to an uneasy confluence of opposing realities. These created environments invite visitors to experience, consider and reflect on our ambivalent attitudes to the natural environment.
This work is inspired by the artist’s investigations of the often forgotten and unseen intrinsic importance of fungi and lichens in stabilising networks of living relationships. These humble organisms are intrinsically connected to vast networks of life on earth, including our own. Yet, to most of us they are inconsequential.

Coarse, fleshy organisms intertwine and penetrate the troposphere, swaddling each vascular network, protecting the almighty mycelial network. This is the living subterranean seam by which our world is connected, regardless of and despite our interventions.

‘Pulse’ is a 4-minute-long video piece, central to the exhibition. This multi-projection of film immerses the visitor in a dystopian representation of the future. Drawing on the ombre chinois’s tradition of shadow play paper mechanical links create a pulley system, using the greenhouse as a motif of human intervention. They are inevitably devoured by the very operating system that created them.

All Flesh will be exhibited in the Gallery of Modern Art Waterford (GOMA) from 14th October to 25th November 2023. This work will also form the gallery’s submission for the Imagine Festival Waterford which will take place in October 2023.

For more details see: www.gomawaterford.ie / 051 582633

GOMA Gallery of Modern Art, 6 Lombard Street, Waterford. X91 F2XP