Irish artist Ali Kirby creates sculptural assemblages and installations that physically respond to the built environment.
Unknowingly, we first experienced Kirby’s work at ‘Describing Architecture’, an exhibition at Dublin’s City Assembly House in 2015. Consisting of concrete, plaster, wood and soap the piece felt at once familiar, like the corner of a domestic construction site, and fragile, like a suspended sculpture; one touch and the whole thing could come tumbling down. We were instantly drawn to the architectural quality of Kirby’s work and her ability to create something so refined from otherwise overlooked materials and objects.
In early 2019, when a mutual liking of each other’s work led to a coffee, we were given the opportunity to meet. Ultimately this meeting led to the most significant Concrete Collar project to date, Soft Boundaries.
Soft Boundaries was born from a desire to collaborate with Kirby and a seedling of an idea we’d had for a few years; to create a performative piece encompassing fashion and architecture at Open House Dublin.
In Andrew Bell, we found the perfect fashion partner; his work and ideals married seamlessly with Kirby’s, our chosen location and our own overall vision for the piece. With the support of Nathalie Weadick, director of the Irish Architecture Foundation and Lar Joye, Port Heritage Director at Dublin Port Company, Soft Boundaries was launched at the Open House Dublin festival of architecture in October 2019. Read more about the project here.
The images shown here are from planes, “a site responsive installation that uses ordinary construction materials to create forms that appear restrained, solid, minimal. However, their fragility is revealed upon closer inspection.” The exhibition was shown at Visual Carlow in 2018.
In planes, “surface treatments such as plaster and cement contain flaws, scars almost, from being repeatedly ‘worked’ to achieve flatness or perfection. Large sculptural forms that closely mimic walls, ramps, columns are constructed using modular, flat pack techniques, making them redundant and temporary.”
This series of images taken by photographer and artist Aisling McCoy aim to abstract and obscure the original intention of the assemblages, flattening them into 2D pictorial planes. Each composition creates a new work from the existing work, capturing fragments of texture, light and shadow within the installation.
Commissioned by the artist, the brief to McCoy was both ambitious and generous. Moving away from the standard exhibition photography we are so familiar with, Kirby instead sought the eye of another artist to interpret and reframe her work. We find the results striking. McCoy’s images demonstrate the intricacies of the interplay between the exhibition space and Kirby’s sculpture; the shadows each piece casts on the horizontal and vertical planes, the subtle dialogue between the artist’s choice of colour along with the attention to detail given to surfaces and finishings.
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