Bring them up to the light one by one. And in pairs, overlapping. Brittle and clinking. Black lines curving across coloured surfaces.
On Pembroke Street Upper I hold up a glass disc and squint through it at the brick building. A salute, and a serve.
Doubles: a new archive is a text, a lecture performance, and a work of glass, archive-grade card, cotton tape, and light. Collectively it conjures a speculative archive into being.
The text was selected as a runner up for the National Gallery of Ireland’s 2024 Sarah Cecilia Harrison Essay Prize. The lecture was first performed at the Hugh Lane Gallery in November 2024. The glasswork was created in collaboration with glass artist Susan O’Connor, and is housed in a specially made archive box.
Doubles is partly inspired by the working relationship between stained glass artist Wilhelmina Geddes and painter and champion of artists Sarah Purser. It is also about tennis, friendship, overlapping, the feel of materials in your hands, the vertiginous overwhelm of archival research, and what arises when two people stand in the same place separated only by time.
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