SANCTUM: a solo exhibition in the vaults at Lavit Gallery, Wandesford Quay, Cork

15/05/2025 - 31/05/2025

An exhibition of photographs, drawings and other objects made in response to my ongoing project at St Fin Barre’s Cathedral, Cork, where I am overseeing the conservation of a large collection of antique plaster models, known as the Burges Maquettes.

Lavit Gallery is located just 300 metres from St Fin Barre’s Cathedral. For the purposes of this exhibition, the gallery’s vaults, tucked snugly below ground level, became a symbolic inner world where I was free to temporarily move away from the structured logic of the conservation project. Here, I could focus on the intriguing visual language of the fragment and embrace the role of chance in my research.

“Things change according to the stance we adopt towards them, the type of attention we pay to them, the disposition we hold in relation to them.”

— Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

The work

*South Tower, St Mark*, 2025, digital print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta 315gsm, dimensions in cm: 42 x 29.5

This photograph was taken on my second visit to the south tower of the cathedral, where some of the maquettes have been stored since the late 1870s. This statue of St Mark is one of the most fragile objects in the room. Its surface is powdery and comes away with the slightest touch. The windows in this tower were made of green glass and when I entered, the room was flooded with an incredible green-gold light. Shortly after this photo was taken, the windows of the tower blew in during a storm and so that very particular light is now gone. As I write, the windows are boarded up and they will stay like that until November 2025. When the windows are back in, the light might be restored but the maquettes will be gone, because we are going to take the opportunity of the windows being replaced to remove the maquettes from the tower.

Still from *Draw, Draw,* 2025, chalk drawing on blackboard, 46 minute film projection with sound, dimensions in cm: 200 x 80 x 42

This is a still from Draw, Draw, a forty-six minute film piece, made amongst the maquettes in the south tower. This film is projected and has a drawn element. In it, chalk drawings are made and unmade. The sounds which accompany this piece are the ambient sounds of the tower. At times the organ can be heard being tuned far below, in the cathedral proper.

*The Finds,* 2025, wooden pallets, blackboard paint, casts in plaster of Paris, dimensions in cm: 117 x 85 x 143

Pallets are often present in my installations. They represent journeys and transportation; they are for taking care of objects in transit. In this case, the pallets refer to how we, at the cathedral treat the Burges maquette fragments once they have been recovered from the damp basement room. The white ‘finds’ on black pallets are cast plaster fragments from cathedral statuary. As with all fragments, they exist as entire objects in their own right and they are also representative of the bigger thing of which they were a part.

*The Shock of the Empty Room,* 2025, archival inkjet print on Hahnemüle Photo Rag 308gsm, dimensions in cm: 42 x 38

After we worked all one particular day in February to empty this room and remove the maquettes to a safer place, I returned briefly to the room to retrieve some torches we’d left there. Despite the fact that I had been involved in emptying the room, when I entered, a shock ran through me like ice for a second. I was hit by the absence, the emptiness and the fact that after 150 years, everything is different now.

*Seeing Nothing (unearthed fragment, Saint Paul)*, 2025, archival inkjet print on Hahnemüle Photo Rag 308gsm, dimensions in cm: 42 x 33.5

*Restorative Moment,* 2025, archival inkjet print on Hahnemüle Photo Rag 308gsm, dimensions in cm: 42 x 33.5

I discovered the lower half of a face among the fragmented maquettes and, three or four days later, I discovered the upper half. Putting them together and referring to the stone carvings on the cathedral, I was able to identify the face as that of St Paul.

As the story goes, St Paul’s pivotal moment was an event on the road to Damascus. He was temporarily blinded for a few days. Eventually his sight was restored and he saw the world through fresh eyes

*Farm Girl/Servant*, photograph of a panel from the ‘female occupations’ series, excavated, 2025, archival inkjet print on Hahnemüle Photo Rag 308gsm, dimensions in cm: 42 x 33.5

This is a photograph of a panel from the ‘female occupations’ series which was recovered from the basement in pieces. When this conservation project began properly, it was 2024 - a year when fragments seemed to be everywhere. Television screens were full of images of rubble and ruins as the situation in the middle east worsened. During Christmas of that year, the Lutheran Church in Jerusalem constructed their crib out of piles of rubble, placing the infant Jesus on top - a striking visual reminder of the relentless destruction in that place. At St Fin Barre’s, we worked to recover more and more chunks of broken plaster from the basement. At times it felt as though we were just delivering more fragments into an ever more fragmented world.