SANCTUM: a solo exhibition in the vaults at Lavit Gallery, Wandesford Quay, Cork
15/05/2025 - 31/05/2025
Exhibition statement: Orla O’Byrne presents photographic work, drawing and installation in response to her ongoing project at St Fin Barre’s Cathedral, Cork, where she is overseeing the conservation of a large collection of historical plaster models.
The Lavit Gallery is located just 300 metres from St Fin Barre’s Cathedral. For this exhibition, the artist envisages the gallery’s vaults, tucked snugly below ground level, as a symbolic inner world where she is free to temporarily depart from the systematised logic of the conservation project. Here, she focuses on the intriguing visual language of fragments and embraces the role of chance in her work.
“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 works
