Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Memento Mori: of bombs and barbs and knitted things

The wonderful Caroline, a.k.a. An Snag Breac amongst her many aliases, has an exhibition 'Memento Mori' on until Thursday at the Roscommon Arts Centre. I'd struggled with exactly how to describe this show by her and her sister, a conundrum that has been solved by how she puts it herself: an exhibition curated by the two of them with work made by three alter egos of each.

It includes textile pieces such as the wonderful knitted dynamite bomb, which recently featured in Craft magazine, alongside Nollaig Dottirson's more recent additions of the knitted molotov cocktail and the 'classic' black spherical bomb, which can also be downloaded as a free knitting pattern.


There is also gigantic textile barbed wire which I'd love to get to grips with – so much more pliable than the real thing.

Puppetry, roadkill taxidermy and found objects are among the media used by An Snag Breac to create "assemblages of phantasmagorical creatures from the discarded detritus of the natural and manufactured world." A skeletal spine used in one piece references her chronic pain experiences, while the textile work of another nom de plume (Enda O'Rourke) is of handkerchiefs embroidered with words of advice.


The other half of the exhibition curated by Jennifer Walshe features the Community Choir Drawings of Turf Boon, a film by Freya Birren revisioning (or creating?) an earlier piece by Olia Lialina entitled 'My Boyfriend Came Back From The War', and the often-unplayable 'subliminal tapes' of treated sound recordings made by Caoimhin Breathnach.

If you're nearby Roscommon Town before the morning of Friday 26th August, check out Memento Mori.

All images above by An Snag Breac.
More information on the exhibition is here and here.

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