Aideen Farrell

My work responds to industrial landscapes and infrastructural ruins, focusing on processes of ruin, extraction, and transformation. Much of this work began with cycling along the Royal Canal, where animal and plant life intertwine with industrial remnants. I've long been fascinated by what rests at the canal's bed and is dredged up in heaps. I have also cycled along and gathered materials along disused railway lines and a sunken Iron Age road in a bog. Newer infrastructure is often overlaid on paths that previous infrastructures have made, and I encounter these layers as I follow these routes. Through working with these paths, I reflect on cyclical and contested processes of ruin, development, and regrowth, challenging notions of inevitable linear progress. For me, there are senses of loss and possibility bound up in these spaces and their material remnants. I gather remnants and materials by bike, in various states of decay, and then work with them as they break down. This slow, iterative process serves as research and a way to think through materials and places. I respond to this with clay pieces in the forms of matrices, dirt, and skeletal architectures. These works express becoming and breaking down, and respond to things being submerged, dug, dredged, and displayed. I combine found and made objects into personal collections and taxonomies. I am interested in countering the aesthetics of preservation and fixity within collection and museum display conventions. I explore the tensions between preciousness, dirt, and precarity in the work, as well as the futility of solitary efforts to preserve or create small, self-contained worlds.