These fleeting temples we make together (2024)
A collaboration with Jonathan H.S. Ross
We’ve been thinking about kindness, trust and intimacy in public spaces, the threshold between the individual and the collective, and moments of brief connection as secular, sacred spaces.
For mother tongue, we constructed a sculptural monument that is part manifesto on co-design, and part meditation on salvage and craft as a radical, civic act in architecture and urban design.
We have returned salvaged pieces from the nearby Orpheus building at Ulster University. Demolished in 2016, the Orpheus was formerly a ballroom, a painting studio, and a formative space that held significance for generations of citizens. Hand-crafted objects and ready-made devices are positioned to illustrate values of generosity and care, and are re-defined through their interaction in the gallery. They push against each other physically and ideologically, in a balancing act of lightness and weight, connection and loss.
Held together and pulled apart, against weight, towards significance, we are heavy and deceptively fragile. Structural integrity may be compromised in pursuit of connection. We want to make our edges permeable for each other.
With thanks to Daniel Jewesbury for his salvage of pieces, and Aubrey Dale for documenting the city. Photo c. Albert Bridge, under Creative Commons.
This piece was part of a group exhibition called mother tongue, held in the MAC, Belfast, 2024.
Photos: Simon Mills, courtesy of the MAC
