This off-site project will take place in the concourse surrounding the Edmund Burke Theatre on the lower floor of the Arts Building, Trinity College, Dublin. Subtly responding to the materials, forms, motifs, and imagery in this active thoroughfare, Áine Mc Bride has produced a new body of sculptures that will temporarily inhabit the space.
While the brutalist architecture of this institutional environment can be stark and unstimulating, it is each day enlivened by the students and visitors who find space here to eat, relax, and study. The group of works that will furnish the concourse refer to the functionality of the surroundings but are formally reduced to a point where it is clear that they cannot serve a practical purpose. Partly a pragmatic decision, made in light of the objects being located in a busy public area, it also circumvents any potential for the pieces to be regarded as ornamentation, obscuring their role as either sculptures or utilitarian objects. This ambiguity emphasises how the nature, or an idea, of a place can be hard to define or rationalise when its intended function is displaced by how it is used.