Caroline Doolin: Fault Bound Bodies

Project Arts Centre is proud to announce Fault Bound Bodies, a new work by Caroline Doolin.

A segment of the flesh of the earth rises in the gallery for Doolin’s Fault Bound Bodies. This large construction, surround-sound and video installation questions whether energy—physical or emotional—can be sustained over the long term.

Sparked by a residency in Portrane, Dublin, which is overlooked by the extinct volcanic island of Lambay, Doolin’s research led her to focus on the earth’s molten core, and the volcanic outpouring of this internal heat. Doolin wants to interrogate the physical and emotional energy that goes into the production and maintenance of this constant, unrelenting process of eruption and production.

Doolin constructs a love story between two volcanic sites, separated by vast continental shifts, in order to question what role the interaction between energy, material and body might play beyond its perceived human use-value. The site of the Hellisheidi geothermal plant in Iceland site pines for its lost love, struggling with its new status as a functional object. It is pierced by geothermal pipelines that mine its heat for energy, despite a fractious and at times hysterical passion that burns within it, as it relentlessly continues to:

Make things work bigger.
Make things work better.
Make things work matter.

The molten origins of this earth are revealed in a dense mosaic of thick, rich and luscious visual imagery from the Hellisheidi Geothermal plant and the liquid birth of glass in a bottle factory, all mixed with immersive, 3D modelled imagery. The viewer swoops and flies over the imagined passion of these vast, geological masses. The steam and hiss of volcanic existence was captured onsite in Iceland and was mixed with a digitised, disembodied voice and fragments of popular song, which forms the volcano voice in the surround sound of the installation.

The story of unexpected lives that thrive on the fresh crust that has been churned out by these “mutants of heat” investigates the interaction between energy, material and body. The “ground dwellers” of Fault Bound Bodies are maleo birds, who lay their eggs in the dense heat of live volcanos, then completely abandon their unhatched young, only to pair up for life. Elsewhere a pair of sharks eke out a life several degrees too hot for their species in an oceanic volcano, unable, or perhaps too listless to move out of their hostile environment.

Finishing with Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams,” Doolin asks whether this love between the two sites—or indeed any physical or emotional energy—can continue relentlessly, across such an enormous space and time, or whether this is just a fiction, an impossible dream:

“It’s too bad that all these things, Can only happen in my dreams
Only in dreams In beautiful dreams.”
–Roy Orbison, “In Dreams,” Monument Records, 1963.
 

Acting Curator Deborah Madden

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Project Arts Centre is delighted to announce the appointment of Lívia Páldi as the new Curator of Visual Arts.
Born in Budapest Lívia Páldi has held a number of key positions including; Director of BAC – Baltic art Center, Visby, Sweden (2012–15), Chief Curator of the Műcsarnok / Kunsthalle Budapest (2007–11), as well as co-founding the Institute of Contemporary Art, Dunaújváros (Hungary). 

Lívia Páldi will commence her term as Curator of Visual Arts at Project in March 2017.

Find out more here.