Cork artist Ailbhe Ní Bhriain: 'Tapestry is this richly material historic form of storytelling'
Cork artist Ailbhe Ní Bhriain. ailbhe ni bhriain
Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s exhibitions tend to be provocative. They often take the form of elaborate multi-screen film installations, using cutting edge technology to explore subjects as arcane as the parallels between ancient mythology and the present day climate crisis.
However, her latest - Interval Two (Dream Pool), at the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin - focuses on other aspects of her practice, including as it does three large-scale Jacquard tapestries, a series of framed pigment prints and two sculptures cast in resin and polyurethane.
The Cork artist has enjoyed working in a variety of media since she began her studies at the Crawford College of Art and Design aged 17. “I remember the sense of giddiness at being introduced to all these disciplines,” she says. “Printmaking, film, installation and sculpture. The tutors – people like Sue Cunliffe, Brian Kennedy and Tony McClure – were hugely supportive and respectful.”
On graduating, Ní Bhriain went on to complete an MA in Fine Art at the Royal College in London. “The approach there was very different,” she says. “They were critically very, very tough, but I think that was necessary and useful, you know. I tried to find a more succinct way of working in my time there, and that was when I began to focus more on film.”
Later, Ní Bhriain completed a PhD by Practice in Fine Art at Kingston University in the UK before returning to lecture at NCAD in Dublin and, more recently, back at the Crawford. “I absolutely love teaching,” she says. “But I’ve been on a career break for the last number of years. I have two children, and I was trying to teach and make art at the same time, so I became a bit of a whirling dervish. I was just completely run ragged.”
The break from teaching has allowed Ní Bhriain to focus on a practice that has, in the past few years alone, included shows in London, Margate and Glasgow in the UK, and in Winconsin in the USA. She won the prestigious Golden Fleece Award and a major Arts Council Project Award in 2020, and one of her tapestries was recently acquired by the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, where it can be seen in the group exhibition, Following Threads.
Of late, much of her time has been devoted to work on an experimental film called The Dream Pool Intervals, the most ambitious project she has undertaken to date. “It’s completely computer generated,” she says, “which makes progress incredibly slow. It’s like building a full film set, but virtually. And then you move a virtual camera through that space to capture your footage. I work with a crew in Belfast. Before the pandemic, I’d travel back and forth on the Aircoach, but now we have day-long meetings online.
“As I say, it’s still a work-in-progress. But I hope to present it, hopefully late next year, as a kind of immersive and dreamlike cinematic installation.”
Much of the work in Ní Bhriain’s Kerlin exhibition is informed by, and complements, the subjects of the film. “They're very different manifestations of the same strands of imagery; underground caves, fragments of archival photographs and ruined architecture, all brought together through collage. The three large tapestries act as a kind of anchoring element, in terms of scale, and they're supported by a series of sculptural pieces, photographic prints and fabrics.”
Ní Bhriain particularly enjoyed working on the Jacquard tapestries, which are woven on a mechanical loom using an early 19th century system of punch cards and sequencing that is now seen as a precursor to computer programming.
“There’s nothing really tangible in the kind of filmmaking I do,” she says. “Nothing you can really show people when you’re working on it. But tapestry is this richly material historic form of storytelling, and it’s really seductive. It's present, and you can touch it.”
The Kerlin exhibition also features two sculptures, We Have Reached a Certain Depth I and II, of cats reclining on the floor. “They kind of bookend the space,” she says.
“In mythology, cats are often seen as guarding the threshold, or acting as companions to those going down into the underworld. In these sculptures, they’re lying on vintage life jackets, blown up to 1.5 scale, and it’s debatable whether they’re asleep or dead. They look slightly ossified or calcified, like they might have been preserved in time.”
Ní Bhriain is already working on a number of projects for 2024. “I’ll be showing at the Innsbruck International Biennal of the Arts in Austria in May,” she says, “and at the Kunstall Gent in Belgium in the summer, where there’s a beautiful bespoke pavilion being built in an old church to show my work in. I’ll also be doing a solo exhibition with Lismore Castle Arts in Waterford in the autumn, so it looks like being a very exciting year.”
- Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Interval Two (Dream Pool) runs at the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin until January 6.
- Further information: kerlingallery.com; ailbhenibhriain.com
