Niamh O’Malley on view at Royal Hibernian Academy, 24 August - 31 October 2023

Niamh O’Malley’s ‘Shelf’ (2022), acquired by Arts Council Ireland Collection from the artist’s Venice Biennale presentation in 2022, is currently on view at Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, until 31 October 2023.

Niamh O’Malley ARHA is interested in the exhibition as an architecture for scrutiny and attention. She is drawn to materials that display traces of their own making, labouring the surfaces of polished wood and graphite. There is a haptic, agitated quality to the edges and surfaces of her sculpture and drawings. When glass, a favoured material is seen it is sometimes tinted, and encountered as slivers of edged, translucent, solidness, potentially directing us to observe, re-observe and filter. O’Malley also uses video for its role as an animator; capturing and arresting attention and reminding us of our compulsion to gather and to make still. Her moving image works deliberately mark the observational tone or document of the film as subjective and delimited. The partial or the glimpse can be enough.'