Marie Farrington
For TULCA, Marie Farrington presents A Material Index of Diagonal Acts, a sculptural installation at the James Mitchell Geology Museum. Installed across the museum’s central aisle, the work reflects on gaps, fragments, edges, and thresholds within archaeology, geology, sculpture, and staged display. Incorporating artefacts from the university’s geological collection and local sediment samples from Dog’s Bay, the sculptural works register, respond to, and incorporate their site and context, reflecting on the conditions of their own visibility.
The collection of objects offers an overview of the processes and material outcomes of Marie’s unfolding cross-site project Diagonal Acts, with new cast works directly responding to the museum’s Victorian display cabinets. These cast objects explore the relationship between glass and visibility through arrangements that use framing, layering and transparency as vehicles for thinking about co-creative relationships.
Diagonal Acts explores the body’s boundaries in the landscape from various counter-topographical perspectives. The project expands on and elaborates a hybrid practice of ‘Theatre/Archaeology’ (Shanks/Pearson, 2001), exploring symmetries between staged presentations and field work via their continual renegotiation of categorical boundaries and their shared interest in memory, partiality, fragment, trace and assemblage. Through iterative material interventions and opportunities for activation, Diagonal Acts excavates the ‘/’ in Theatre/Archaeology as a site of interdisciplinarity, convergence, and borders reworked, articulated through the sculptural position of the diagonal line. Thinking across and between sites through conditional modes of encounter, Diagonal Acts explores diagonality as a relational and collaborative stance, temporarily ‘leaning’ against contexts, communities and histories.
A Material Index of Diagonal Acts, 2025
Wax, glass, anthracite, steel, volcanic olivine sand, bio-resin, soapstone, and local sediment samples
James Mitchell Geology Museum
The Quadrangle, University of Galway
Galway H91 FN8X
Access Information
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Strange lands still bear common ground
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo
7-23 November 2025
Galway, Ireland
Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon
Photo documentation: Ros Kavanagh