Fiona Kelly: A Temporary Iteration

May 7–August 20, 2022

Fiona Kelly: A Temporary Iteration

Fiona Kelly addresses themes of ecology and society. Her research into wilderness, matter, and geology considers the human exploration of landscape—understood as both a relationship with the natural world and an extractivist approach to natural resources. Her prints and sculptures depict various sites and/or take the form of specific natural elements. She produces her works with discarded materials—by-products of the built environment—that she forages and transforms.

A Temporary Iteration combines sculpture, moving image, and sound. Nineteen 3D pieces replicate the shape of a scalenohedron, a crystal formed from calcite. This mineral is the principal constituent of the esker, a low-lying ridge composed of sand, gravel, and boulders deposited during the last glacial cycle. The objects lie on the floor and on top of one another, their various planes operating as projection screens. Footage of dynamic landmasses, organic matter, a re-wilded quarry, and pseudo-mountains of raw and unprocessed waste interacts with ambient sounds recorded inside a waste processing facility and collected along the Esker Riada, a key Irish esker. Kelly’s imagined topography shows the esker’s ruination from extractivist activity and its current status—somewhere between a utopian return to nature and the realities of extractive land use.