Travel and the resultant interactions with breathtaking geographical locations has become the central driving force in this current, particular body of work by Brian Kennedy on show in Limerick. The installations and photographs that constitute this exhibition indicate the enormous and very rich well of influences that Kennedy has encountered on his recent travels. Parallels could be drawn to a variety of other artists who have made artworks related to their travels. However, with Kennedy's current work you get the feel that his personal travel experiences have thrown up larger, more philosophical questions.

Ultimately all travellers are seeking an answer to the age old question: 'Why am I here?' In effect, this exhibition and the specific materials that Kennedy manipulates throw up more questions than answers about the human condition. Kennedy describes his current art practice as a marriage of travelling, writing, curating and creating artworks.

On entering the atrium space of the Gallery, the viewer is lured by a visual array of stunning photographic vistas from around the globe (Sicily, Guatemala, the Sahara, Sidi Bou Said, New York, north-west America, the Blue Ridge Mountains in the fall, Krakow, Berlin, Katowice). On closer inspection we can see that each landscape contains a golden egg. Kennedy describes these eggs as metaphors for ideas, initially precious and exciting but more often than not discarded or unrealised. The eggs are hard-boiled then gilded with gold leaf, then placed and left in the landscape for whoever may encounter (or steal!) them. Of course, after several days these precious objects of attraction become the opposite, as they start to smell and decay.

Brian Kennedy: 'Golden egg', as left at Tikal, Guatemala; photo/courtesy the artist

The large gallery space on the first floor offers Kennedy's most recent work, an installation entitled Aphrodite. The starting point for this installation is a quote from Hesiod's Theogony, which Kennedy read while in residence at the British School in Rome. On entering the darkened space the viewer experiences a metaphorical seascape created using dark-blue velvet-like material (sourced from a material shop in the old Jewish quarter in Rome). Onto this material wave foam caps are suggested by the subtle use of plaster. This work is strongly illuminated by a single spotlight, and a soundtrack of rolling waves crashing on an anonymous shoreline activates the entire installation. It could be Crete; it might just as easily be Achill.

Brian Kennedy: Aphrodite, floor installation in cloth and plaster; photo/courtesy the artist

There are numerous references here to the cinematography of Federico Fellini or David Lean. At the same time there is also a feel of northern-European theatricality, echoing the stage sets of Kantoor or Brecht. The installation feels immediately seductive and has that rare quality that artworks can induce, i.e., the ability to transport you for a brief period of time to another space with another set of references.

In a separate, smaller gallery space is contained a single piece of work entitled Echo. This consists of a hand-made, gilded (gold leaf) book containing extracts from a poem by Ciarán Carson entitled Athlone through Hilversum. This work makes references to journeys of the mind through the advent or radio waves and stations, echoing a time in Ireland when our imaginations were fired by station names like Luxemburg, Hilversum, or Moscow.

The final installation contains a room with a mound of soot, mercury on a silver plate and glass teardrops. Mercury here is used as a metaphor for the bringing of knowledge, the mercury on the plate seeming to suggest a strange map of part of the universe or perhaps some yet-undiscovered star, perhaps even a place in the mind. Contrasting with this is the soot, which suggests death or the destruction of ideas. The glass tear drops might just be rain, that giver of life, or then again they might be angelic tears from angels crying for lost knowledge.

Sean Taylor is an artist based in Limerick and is currently Course Director of Sculpture and Combined Media at Limerick Institute of Technology, School of Art and Design.

Brian Kennedy: Aphrodite, Limerick City Gallery of Art, June/July 2003

Article reproduced from CIRCA 105, Autumn 2003, pp. 106-107.