We Lose Sight of the Night: Aisling O’Beirn

For billions of years, all life has relied on Earth’s predictable rhythm of day and night. It’s encoded in the DNA of all plants and animals. Humans have radically disrupted this cycle by lighting up the night.

Plants and animals depend on Earth’s daily cycle of light and dark to govern life-sustaining behaviours such as reproduction, nourishment, sleep, and protection from predators.

Scientific evidence suggests that artificial light at night has negative and deadly effects on many creatures, including amphibians, birds, mammals, insects, and plants.

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. An interest in the wonders and political importance of the night sky characterises much of this exhibition, 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 a new commission for the Upper Gallery is a sculptural piece constructed specifically for the Upper Gallery. The precarious structure 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 build 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.

Our gallery programme is proudly supported by:

Image credit:

Aisling O’Brien

Night Sky (Second Hand)

August, Looking South 2022

Charcoal & compressed chalk on Cartridge Paper

594 x 841 mm

Aisling O’Beirn’s exhibition We Lose Sight of the Night is the first in a series of exhibitions which address climate and environmental change. O’Beirn (born in Galway) is a Belfast based artist, her practice explores the relationship between art and science and manifests variously as sculpture, installation, animation and site-specific projects.