tHERE 


tHERE is a collaborative work by artists Pauline O’Connell and Ellen Martin-Friel, inspired by Georges Perec’s Tentative D’épuisement D’un Lieu Parisien (An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, 1975). Perec’s performative writing method involved observing and documenting the seemingly insignificant, capturing the ordinary happenings of Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris, in October 1974. O’Connell reimagines this immersive exercise in the upland area near where she lives at Brooke’s Cross, a rural crossroads close to Castlewarren in County Kilkenny, Ireland. Over three days, she positioned herself in a small, round-roofed, corrugated steel school bus shelter as she observed the choreography of rural life, recording seemingly insignificant moments of movement and stillness, animal and elemental perceptions through sparse, evocative prose.
             Much like Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, O’Connell’s performative writing exercise highlights the tension between absence and presence, action and inaction, transforming the shelter into a sensory chamber attuned to the rhythms of her surroundings. The resulting observations translate the visual, aural and olfactory stimuli as they were perceived, inviting a deep engagement with the subtleties of place and time aiming to dispel the rural pejorative that nothing happens there.
              This edition is designed, typeset and letterpress printed by Ellen Martin-Friel while in residency at Distillers Press, Dublin. Martin-Friel’s visual interpretation of the text conveys a sense of place and captures the nuanced flow of time felt within the writing. Using typographic devices and playing with opacity and scale, this representation creates a dynamic interplay between the narrative threads while evoking the sensory stimuli described in the writing. The text flows directionally – dropping, rising and shifting in perspective – and is punctuated by red timestamps marking the chronological nature of the piece. Presented as accordion-folded loose leaves, the book forms a triptych representing the three days of performative writing, with the folded panels taking on a sculptural quality reminiscent of the corrugated metal shelter. Through the act of unfolding, the reader can reorientate themselves, in time and place, to the crossroads where O’Connell observed the minutiae of everyday rural life.

Edition of 75
255 x 180mm folded
€380 — Currently discounted to €299

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