Palimpsest

Hazel EGAN

Launch: 2 pm Saturday 26th February 2022

Black Church Print Studio Street Cabinet, 4 Temple Bar, Dublin 2

Time
Land
Layered
Journey

As part of  Black Church Print Studio’s recent exhibition Living Balance, one of the featured artists, Hazel Egan, has made a site-specific work which will reside in the glass street cabinet located between the Black Church Print Studio’s front door and the large ground floor gallery window. It is a month-long installation as a reminder of the ideas which Living Balance explored: pattern, ritual, voice, language and re-wilding.

Borrowing its title from a book written by architect Niall McCullough, Hazel Egan’s work Palimpsest opens up limestone strata and expands time allowing the viewer to ponder spacious geological layers. A palimpsest is defined as a parchment on which writing has been partially or completely erased to make room for a new text layered on top. This definition essentially refers to the fossils in the limestone that frame the gallery window. The limestone tiles are spliced and sanded exposing remnants of marine life that have accumulated in each layer of stone.

In Egan’s Palimpsest the drawings tumble through the layers of time, falling from one panel to the next, referencing the fossils and the rhythm of their repetition. The drawings evolve further into narratives of possible futures whilst also retaining the marks of what has gone before. In fact, each drawing is a tracing of beach pebbles that the artist holds close to her person. The cabinet acts as a portal; planetary and cosmic arcs of time are softened and bound by an enthralling particulate matter. A lunar blue haze allows for a refractive quality, as light would appear passing through the ocean’s surface. It is a sequence of prints, erected to appear like a support structure, or column. Palimpsest stands inside its glass street cabinet, sheltered, cared for and encouraging the eye to wander and rest inside and around its body. The back of the cabinet wall is painted in a blue grey hue called Mountain Ridge which is a fitting reference to rock and strata. It is lit with bars of light highlighting its floating presence and illuminating it as a protracted lingering structure.
–    Debi Paul, curator

Palimpsest is a site-specific print made for the Black Church Print Studio Street Cabinet as part of the Studio’s 40th Anniversary event series. The print references the physical studio, designed by McCullough Mulvin Architects, and also celebrates the lives of the many members and artists that have occupied the building over the years. Fossils in the Irish limestone that can be seen running along the base of the building’s façade provided a starting point when questioning the relationships and rhythms between living organisms, environment, and the passage of time. The title, Palimpsest, speaks to the cyclical nature of sedimentary rock formation but also to the traces and residual marks of materials and bodily movements left behind by the activities of the studio’s members, a communal legacy of sorts. Palimpsest is dedicated to Niall McCullough (1958-2021) of McCullough Mulvin Architects and is a celebration of his work which explored the relationship between nature, time and architecture.
–    Hazel Egan, artist

For updates on our upcoming exhibitions, events, courses, and more just add your email to subscribe.