Edge of Range
A solo exhibition by Laura Ní Fhlaibhín
Curated by Catherine Bowe
Wexford Arts Centre
27 August – 3 October 2024
Opening Launch: Saturday 24 August at 2pm
The exhibition opening will take the form of an informal talk between Artist Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, Assistant Professor in Environmental Horticulture, UCD, Dr. Noeleen Smyth, and Horticulturist Edel Maher.
Followed by a wine reception.
All welcome to attend.
Wexford Arts Centre is pleased to present Edge of Range by artist Laura Ní Fhlaibhín. The exhibition will run in the lower and upper galleries from Tuesday 27 August to Thursday 3 October, 2024. A written response titled Assembly of Sick Allies by Curator and Writer Sophie J Williamson accompanies the exhibition.
Ní Fhlaibhín’s practice makes space for the more than human within art-institution settings; gallery spaces become incubators for living things such as earthworms, leopard slugs, and willow trees. Working across sculpture, installation, writing, and drawing, embodied care is both represented and inscribed in the material and narratives that are interwoven in her sculptural assemblages.
For this exhibition, Ní Fhlaibhín has focused on the cotton weed plant which is a distinctive species recognized by its dense covering of white, cottony hairs and yellow flower heads. In her early research conducted with Tony Murray, Wexford National Park Wildlife Service Ranger, the term ‘edge of range’ resonated and lingered with the artist. The term refers to a biological concept that denotes the vulnerabilities that take hold at the edges and limits of an ecology. At present, the cotton weed plant is in a perilous state all across Europe, completely extinct in temperate biomes across Ireland and the UK, except for a patch of sand dunes at Our Lady’s Island. The last stand for the survival of the cotton weed is happening less than twenty kilometers from Wexford Arts Centre. The exhibition traces the story of this near extinction through a symbiotic sculptural installation, wall-based works, and ongoing dialogues with human allies of the cottonweed.
Ní Fhlaibhín builds installations that operate as symbiotic ecosystems, sculptural assemblages giving structural and biological support; such as a network of soil pipes filled with worm bedding materials or a medicinal, and warming alcoholic tincture offered to gallery visitors over the course of an exhibition. Her assemblages function as nourishing hosts for growth and invite guardianship from the art-institution hosts. The looming threats of the environmental crisis and biodiversity loss echo through the work, and through the artist’s attention towards the material entanglements of our worlds, across species and things, she points to vibrant and nourishing kinships that can emerge from such alliances.
Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, an artist from Wexford, completed her MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2019 and her BA at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, in 2013. Laura is a Gilbert Bayes Royal Society of Sculptors Award U.K. recipient 2024 and has been awarded the 2025 Derek Hill Foundation residency at the British School of Rome. She was the recipient of the Goldsmiths Almacantar Bursary 2019, and was awarded the Next Generation Award 2020 from the Arts Council of Ireland. She received the Arts Council of England ‘Developing Creative Practice Award 2021’, and the Arts Council of Ireland Visual Artist Bursary in 2021 and in 2022.
Recent selected exhibitions include ‘Painkiller’, a solo show at Commonage Projects London, 2024, curated by Séamus Mc Cormack; ‘Banana Accelerationism’, a two-person show with Sean Lynch, curated by Mark O’Gorman at The Complex, Dublin, 2024; ‘Wet suction spins forever’, a two person show at Belmacz, London 2023; ’Wet Wishes’ a solo show at Britta Rettberg Gallery, Munich 2023; and ‘Materials for virtue/Incandescent flare’, a group show at Britta Rettberg Gallery, Munich 2022, curated by Àngels Miralda.
Wexford Arts Centre is supported by the Arts Council and Wexford County Council.
For further information on Edge of Range or artist Laura Ní Fhlaibhín contact Catherine Bowe – Curator, Wexford Arts Centre, Cornmarket, Wexford on +353 (0)53 91 23764 or catherine@wexfordartscentre.ie.
Gallery hours are Tuesday to Friday from 10am – 5pm and Saturday from 10am – 4pm.
Image: This image was published by the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland in their journal British & Irish Botany 4(3): 248-272 (2022), and originally as two plates by Cecil Hurst in Memoirs and Proceedings of the Manchester Literary & Philosophical Society (Manchester Memoirs) 46 (1): 1-8 (1901). The image was then referenced by Tony Murray and Dr. Mike Wise Jackson in their paper ‘The history, status and conservation management of Cottonweed Achillea maritima (Otanthus maritimus) (Asteraceae) at Lady’s Island Lake’.
