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Cork: Daphne Wright at Crawford
The wide
open spaces of the new upstairs gallery are ideal for
Daphne Wright's haunting installation, These Talking
Walls. The space is filled by two gigantic silver
spaceships, which recall the Soviet Mir Space Station,
lying on their sides, slightly tilted, and at an angle
to each other. The largest has two narrow pipes or handles
about six inches long, one sticking out from either side,
and the smaller has a pipe on top. From the far end of
the gallery the massive silver shapes are framed by the
wing-like white end wall, tapering perfectly into the
long window.
On the walls
are four black-and-white prints of a barren, almost featureless
landscape. A listless female voice can be heard above
the ambient noise of footsteps and echoes from the lower
gallery. "Cool water" are the only words you hear at first.
Wright was
born in County Longford in 1963, and studied at Sligo
RTC and the NCAD, Dublin, before moving to England to
do an MA in Newcastle. She lives and works in Bristol.
Recent solo shows include Shine at the Lowry
Centre, Salford Quays (2002), and Where Do Broken
Hearts Go? at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin
(2000). She is currently working with Johnny Hanrahan
on Croon, a multi-disciplinary collaboration
to be presented by the Meridian Theatre Company and the
National Sculpture Factory in Cork from 2 to 7 February,
2003.
Contradiction
is the key to Daphne Wright's work. Having previously
worked in plaster and wood, often with sound, she moved
on to large shapes made from tinfoil. While the spaceships
appear to be anonymous industrial constructions, they
are in fact hand-made, by cutting and folding narrow strips
of domestic aluminium foil which are coated in resin,
and then stuck together. They look heavy, but presumably
are as lightweight as the giant cacti in Where Do Broken
Hearts Go?
In These
Talking Walls the voice is as misty, its words as
diffused, as the framed landscapes. The voice's frailty
contrasts with the shininess and coldness of the emblems
of high technology lying on the floor.
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Top
and above:
Daphne Wright: These Taling Walls,
2003, installation shots; courtesy Crawford Municipal
Gallery
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The idea
of space travel, probably the most technologically complex
activity available to man, is provocatively juxtaposed
with the repetition of the simple word 'water', an element
without which there can be no life. As the short loop
of sound repeats, it becomes apparent that some of the
words are rhyming: "All day I face the barren waste without
the taste of water, cool water. With throats burned dry
and souls that cry for water cool clear water..."
The installation's
title These Talking Walls points to the idea of
someone trapped inside these things; the derangement that
would surely follow is indicated by the voice's occasional
incoherence. It is a very eerie piece indeed.
The terrifying
loneliness of space, its isolation, and the inadequacy
of the man-made spaceship in the face of infinity are
all suggested. Like the rhyming words that echo in the
head, the elements of the puzzle haunt one's consciousness
long after leaving the gallery.
Alannah
Hopkin
Daphne Wright:
These Talking Walls, Crawford Municipal
Gallery, Cork, October/November 2003
