- Venue
- Derby Museum and Art Gallery 20th September - 23rd November 2014
- Location
- East Midlands
The Crossing literally opens Denis O’Connor’s show Defining a Line, by forcing viewers to walk between the gateway of its dual ladders, and underneath a lightening streak that bridges the gap. Atop is miniscule chair, equidistant between the two poles of support. It is a dynamic welcome to a world of sculptural wonders, elongated viewpoints and distorted scales. A symphony in metal: polished stainless, rusted mild, treated steel and other elements with the industrial mill scale of manufacture untouched.
O’Connor’s work concerns longing, reaching and perhaps even the dislocation of being between a rock and hard place. The sense of not belonging in either camp, of going elsewhere, being elsewhere and dreaming of elsewhere. As O’Connor reveals the sculptures here make “reference to the journey” he has “been undertaking as an Irish emigrant from England to Ireland over the past twenty-five years”. These concerns of displacement manifest themselves via hollow passages punched through various sculptures, ladders leading to hidden destinations and even nowhere at all. Heavy forms have been propped to lean precariously, but shifted from their axis by tiny chairs, in the way that seemingly innocuous events can change the everyday course of events or even entire lives.
Other formal means shape the views of his sculptures. For example, the roof of Hiding in the Attic is pierced by a door security lens. Peering through distorts the view of the tiny ladder that descends from the roof into a vertical chamber driven through the sculpture. On paper it might seem kitsch, but in reality it produces an intriguing and otherworldly view of the sculpture.
Look Towards The Fastnet is the tallest sculpture in the show and reveals the most extreme distortion of scale with a tiny gigantic chair, the seat being small but the legs are a distant 12 foot. This transforms the simple chair from an observed object to a symbolic one that infers the unattainability of some things we desire. For O’Connor, this typology of sculpture is geographically personal and confirms the importance of certain places to his emotional autobiography.
Once A Catholic Always A Catholic is a vertiginous sculpture, at its upper reaches a small chair is trapped within a cage of steel bars that then meander downwards like jellyfish tentacles. The cage is rigid and unbending, geometrically precise which heightens the organic perception of the escaping legs. The trapped chair has been deliberately spot lit, which also create dramatic shadows on the gallery walls. One wonders whether this duality of rigidity and softness juxtaposed is a comment on the moral compass and shenanigans staining the church’s recent behaviour, as much as it may be self-referential.
It is a strong show well worth seeing; with a physical presence that is often absent from other outings of contemporary art. Intimate in scale and intimate in their emotional content, these sculptures strike a chord that pulls at the heart strings of memories: be they yours or his.
