We Lose Sight of the Night: Aisling O’Beirn

This major survey exhibition across all three of the MAC galleries brings together newly commissioned works and reworked older pieces made over the last two decades. Much of the work in this exhibition can be characterised as an interest in the wonders and political importance of the night sky.

Central to this expansive presentation of O’Beirn’s work is a research project Right to the Night which examines the political nature of celestial space, where stars are celebrated as the ultimate recycling plants, and where our right to the night-time environment is highlighted and explored.

Using both traditional means such as drawing and animations, as well as a range of absurd sculptural devices, O’Beirn explores the celestial as an ecologically active agent in urgent need of protection and preservation from the ravages of aggressive short term economic opportunism. Projects have investigated ideas around entropy, order, disorder and balance exploring how laypersons try to understand scientific and mathematical ideas in political terms.

The Initial Conditions is a sculptural piece constructed specifically for the Upper Gallery. The precarious structure is made from salvaged scrap timbers and found objects emanating from a school easel. It visually references the Big Bang an energetic and theoretical event that resulted in a rapidly expanding universe. The work gives a hopeful nod to the political ambition and optimism enshrined in Tatlin’s Tower, a monument that was never actually built but exists in the political imagination via photographs of a now non-existent model which has none the less spawned various reconstructions and reinterpretations.

We Lose Sight of the Night invites us to examine the night sky, the impacts of light pollution and the importance of darkness and our relentless use of materials, the detritus of a consumer society critiquing the unsustainable production of yet more stuff.