Irish artist Sam Keogh, now based in London, focuses on mixing materials of varied colour, texture and value to produce strangely familiar yet numinous objects. Keogh is interested in how matter can contain power, or the various ways that an object can become important, valuable or auratic. Through a combination of their production and display, these ‘things’ declare the contingency of their power and simultaneously return to themselves as a currency in their own right.

This exhibit will be shown alongside the work of English artist, Lucy Andrews. Andrews, based in Dublin and a recent graduate of NCAD, explores spaces of illusion and everydayness through her carefully crafted sculptures that are embodiments of familiar objects. Andrews assembles found objects, domestic detritus and various liquids into what can variously take the form of playful experiments or seemingly accidental occurrences.

The materials she uses are allowed to react with each other in such a way as to reveal hidden agencies, emphasizing their volatile and temporary nature. This is how the work suggests possibilities, like the potential for transformation and the subversion of physical forces.

Rather than using materials as a means to an end, both artists treat the materials they work with as active, fluctuating, and vital ends in themselves. Through a process of experimentation, work is made in collaboration with matter, and eventually articulated as an object, which speaks of this relationship.
This collaboration with the material of the work extends to the gallery space it is shown in. Each object draws attention to its context through a complicity with the idiosyncrasies of the architecture and its various infrastructures of lighting and walkable space. These works are in the way, hard to see or even intrude on each other and on the viewer. In this way, the object’s presence is favoured over its presentation, making the ‘stuff’ of this exhibition stubbornly present.