Overworld, at the LAB, Dublin

Tadhg McSweeney

18/07/2008 - 23/08/2008

Tadhg McSweeney's Overworld seems to be a world not unlike our own with shorelines, new moons and trees whose roots spread out like mirror images of branches above. But Overworld is also a place in which nature appears to be reclaiming the land; where tides rise to create floods and where lava flows. At other times what we are looking at is less clear and a search for clues ensues only to return us to the realisation that McSweeney's self enclosed fictional yet fantastical universe seems to be governed by its own logic. Each work, be it sculpture, painting or work on paper becomes a fragment of a larger visual allegory, but one that is not spelt out for us. Instead it is loosely associative, part fantasy and part reflection of our own world.

Much of McSweeney's work revolves around the accumulation of objects, some of which have been laid aside for years before being used. He is drawn to the worn surface, the humble, discarded and close at hand. Old heels from shoes, timber brought in by the tide, metal objects worn by the elements and sweet wrappers found on the street combine with discarded motors, packing tape and sheets of perspex. His paintings and works on paper are usually made from reworked surfaces such as unfinished canvases that have built up a history of marks. These seemingly disparate elements, whether old brush marks on a piece of paper or objects discovered by chance, come together to form works that gently move between abstraction and figuration. And so a piece of plastic stuck to a remnant of timber becomes a house, an accidental marking on a once discarded painting begins to look like a canoe cast out into a quiet ocean with no view of land in sight. Each element is a small fragment from the past around which McSweeney will then construct an entire world.

McSweeney's sculptures often appear on the verge of becoming unstuck, as if they are at the point of breaking down or blowing a fuse. There is a certain amount of tinkering going on, of stripping back electrical elements and reassembling them in new forms. McSweeney may alter the voltage or stumble upon a chance anomaly in a motor that he then incorporates into a sculpture. In Nest, a metal object sits perched on spindly timber legs, crackling and croaking as if sending out a warning signal which tells us to retreat. As in much of his work, when we look more closely we can see the workings of his sculptures – the wires that lead to a rotating mechanism which breaks the contact between two wires causing them to rub and crackle. At full voltage, McSweeney's metal object would become a siren, but in its failure to scream and to work how it is supposed to work, it has become something of much more interest – an electrified cricket that croaks when we come too close. In Horn in P. (Pipe) a record player is stripped back, the needle scratching against metal and amplified to create a pounding and primal beat. Sensors trigger further motors and sounds as we enter the darkened space. Locks suspended by threads clank, cardboard tubes howl as they rotate over speakers, adding to a layered and swarming sound that is disturbing, savage even, but at the same time exciting. These two works in particular create the sense of a post apocalyptic terrain, of watchtowers and monuments created from objects that are no longer used for their original functions but which represent the collective memory of a lost civilisation.

In an earlier small sculptural work entitled Island Life (2007), McSweeney toyed with the universal fantasy of being alone on a desert island, complete with sun lounger and setting sun. The idea of being castaway as an extended holiday and as a utopian ideal away from the stresses of daily life, is a tempting one, But this isolation could equally turn into a nightmare as described in William Golding's Lord of the Flies where savagery takes over and utopia quickly degenerates into dystopia. In Overworld, the inevitability of destruction seems ever present, drawing obvious parallels with current fears about climate change. Overworld in this sense could be regarded as a mirror to our own world, where shorelines are eroded by rising sea levels and severe flooding becomes a more common occurrence. What would it be like to be castaway amongst the remnants of this post apocalyptic terrain? Would it be a terrifying existence or a paradise where life is reduced to the rhythm of nature; where the moon rises and the tides roll in and out.

Much of McSweeney's work is about the making of art for arts sake - of building, taking apart and invention. But ever present in the work is a sense of hope and of a certain utopian ideal that extends beyond the persistent anxieties of destruction present in Overworld. It is a hopefulness that is characterised by his sculptures with their motors that struggle on regardless, and by his paintings which remind us that there is always calm after the storm.


Jacqui McIntosh is an independent writer and curator and has written for publications such as The Guardian, Contemporary, Magill and Circa. She is Assistant Director of the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery in Dublin.

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