Laura Ní Fhlaibhín

Laura Ní Fhlaibhín’s work taps into ideas concerning ritual and transformation of different kinds of bodies, focusing on a long-standing preoccupation with marl clay and drawing on the historical context of this substance as housing material for tenant labourers enduring precarity in 18th century Ireland.

Upon a fabricated steel autopsy table in the gallery she has constructed a kind of thermal bath for a collection of moulded ceramic spirits gathered together in an steaming earthy archipelago. These entities have been dug from the artist’s uncle’s garden in north Wexford, and they are imagined to be in a rapturous mood, caressing themselves and experiencing joy and pleasure that was never granted to them in their previous lives. These are a lively, ecstatic, orgasmic dead and they are being cared for on this tabletop which is regularly topped up with heated Galway water infused with hedera helix oil over the course of the festival.

There is an ongoing preoccupation with synthesising support systems in Ní Fhlaibhín’s installations. Materials that in some way offer up healing and nourishment (such as clay and essential oils), are a key component in her formation of sculptural mechanisms of circulation and regeneration. Her work makes space for tangible gestures of care towards humans, spirits, plants and minerals. Her work makes space for ghosts.

Laura Ní Fhlaibhín creates complex but pithy material scenarios. These may incorporate condensed sculptural images, mineral deposits, texts and formal gatherings of elements that also serve as ritual artefacts. Her work frequently implies the key category of care, of both self and others, humans and animals, objects and materials. Care is both represented and inscribed in the material and narrative improvisations that are interwoven in sculptural assemblages. Increasingly, perhaps amplified by the pandemic, rituals of mourning and remembering in a spirit of playful animacy are manifested. Her practice makes space for ghosts. Laura completed her MFA at Goldsmiths in 2019. Recent exhibitions include, ‘Trailblazer; Pallas Projects Dublin, ’Conditions’, Croydon, ’In the marl walled court of the Fairyqueen’, Courthouse Arts Centre Ireland, ‘Society of Nature’, OnCurating, Zurich, ‘Meet; Gorey School of Art, ’Gargle’, RAW labs, London, 2020, ’Róisín,silver, rockie’, Palfrey, London. She was the recipient of Goldsmiths Graduate Almacantar Bursary Award 2019, and Next Generation Bursary, Irish Arts Council 2020. Laura was awarded Arts Council England award, Developing Your Creative Practice, 2021, Visual Arts Bursary Award Irish Arts Council 2021, and Agility Award 2021. Laura works between London and Dublin, and currently is a resident artist at Firestation Studios.

Image (L-R):
This is the thin place, the Fairyland realm, that refutes capital hoarding and stock swellings and corporate interests and burnings and binaries and apartheids and zero hour contracts and hunts and health funding cuts and ejectments of those that reside in Marl mortar huts, and rather, is allied with the systemically miniaturised enslaved exploited infected plagued whipped abducted illegitimised now-Spirits and those newly dead and those very near dead becoming- Spirits from the near passings, carbonising still, and lubricating and licking and sucking their own holes and stretching to touch their own peaks and entering their own wet folds in warming pleasuring pools, and on ridges and caves and crevices, by wispy hedera helix cloud trails, in the thin place 2021. Engraved stainless steel medical bucket, hot plate, warming Galway water, stainless steel, plastic protective gloves.
statues 2021. Marl clay, dug from the artist’s uncle’s garden in North Wexford, then kiln fired.
bath balm 2020. Stainless steel, 8 castor wheels, oil of hedera helix, warm Galway water, hot plate.
Photo: Ros Kavanagh