Audio Described Tour: Happenstance

Join us for an audio described tour of our current exhibition Eilis O'Connell: Happenstance. This accessible tour designed for blind and visually impaired visitors will be led by one of our trained staff members, who will give a detailed description of selected artworks in the exhibition.

Internationally celebrated for her large-scale public works, this solo exhibition HAPPENSTANCE offers a deeper insight into Eilis O’Connell’s transformative practice.

O’Connell’s sculptural work often evokes states of becoming and transformation, reflecting her long-standing fascination between the organic and geometric in the natural world. This way of working melds irregularity and flow to the precise and mathematical, emblematic of a human relationship to nature. Since the beginning of O’Connell’s career in the late 70’s, she has employed this tension of configuration through her simultaneously monumental and intimate work. Her attentive process is of happenstance: a responsiveness to a materials behaviour and chance occurrences that are worked through and feel not imposed but discovered. Through careful observation of the everyday landscape in her Cork home, O’Connell’s practice instils curiosity and an unexpected sense of discovery and awareness.

This solo exhibition thematically links across O’Connell’s distinguished career to her newly created works; tracing an on-going dialogue with material, form and making across steel, bronze, stone and wood. Her sculptures display a quiet emergence; etiolated shapes that stretch and search like living matter seeking light. Other works explore pattern and balance, reflecting a tension between interior and exterior worlds. Throughout the exhibition, there is an unfolding of organic and geometric form which produce a glimpse of something, an unusual way of seeing.

This friendly and informal tour will last approximately one hour with time for questions and answers.