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ADAPTATIONS, Sarah Browne and Gareth Kennedy                           

This exhibition marks the conclusion of the artists’ use of a project space at Leitrim Sculpture Centre. The exhibition will present a number of works that have been initiated, developed and completed during this time, and features two solo projects and one collaborative piece. 

The title refers both to the artist’s attempts to make work using materials and methods responsive and appropriate to their environment, and adjustments they enact upon it. This implies a flexible approach, and techniques used in the exhibition include wood construction, drawing, hand knitting and video-editing. The works include tactical responses to places and contexts as diverse as a Southeast Asian zoo; rural Ireland and Iceland.  Some of these works will be presented in the sculpture centre’s distinctive ‘shop window’ spaces.

Chicken Coop Trailer (Kennedy, 2006) is an agricultural trailer, converted to operate as a mobile, small-scale poultry operation. The trailer functions as a model of sorts for other possible customisations, sample designs of which are also displayed, including a sauna, distillery, and cinemobile.  A Model Society (Browne, 2006) is a project in progress, a public work being made with a group of people in Iceland who responded to an ad placed for knitwear models.  Selected texts from their answers to a survey are knitted into the sweaters they will model.  Such texts are particular to Icelandic culture but also perhaps representative of the qualities necessary for ‘a model society’: no war; free clean water; long workhours; rotten politics?  Also in the exhibition is current collaborative work that addresses in microcosm wider issues of social and ecological importance, such as climate change and peak oil production: this approach is non-narrative and non-literal, and maybe slightly absurd.

Sarah Browne and Gareth Kennedy both graduated from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, in 2003.