EMER O’BRIEN
Family Workshop
25.07.26
12:00–16:00
Islington was once a very different place from the busy high street we know today.
In the seventeenth century, visitors travelled here to enjoy destinations such as White Conduit House, the London Spa, Merlin's Cave, the Queen's Head and St Mary's Church. Holloway Road takes its name from the "hollow way" created over centuries as livestock—mainly cattle—were driven along the route to London's markets, gradually wearing the road into the landscape. Chapel Street first appears in the Clerkenwell rate books in 1790, when fifteen houses were built there, while Chapel Market was flourishing by the mid-nineteenth century.
It was during this period that Charles Darwin began writing his final book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms (1881). Although often overlooked, this remarkable study demonstrated the vital role earthworms play in creating fertile soil, preserving archaeological remains and quietly shaping the landscapes beneath our feet.
Join us as we turn back time and help transform our gallery wormery into a mock
Tudor building. Using recycled cardboard collected from Chapel Market, we will build a temporary façade inspired by Islington's past. Visitors will also help feed the worms with copies of historical material, market produce, and rubbings taken from manhole covers and other traces of the local environment. Together these contributions will become compost rich with the history of Islington.
When the exhibition ends, the cardboard façade will also be fed back to the worms, completing a full cycle of growth, decay and renewal. In busy urban environments we are often disconnected from where our food comes from and how living systems sustain us. Through making, storytelling and play, this workshop reconnects us with these hidden ecological processes, inviting participants to build a structure that is part temple, part shrine and part reliquary—celebrating the people, places and histories that continue to shape Islington.
Suitable for all ages. Children under 16 must be accompanied by an adult.
This is a drop-in workshop, with activities designed to last around one hour, although participants are welcome to stay longer, space permitting.
Emer O’Brien charts fragments of a much wider world in her analogue photographs. The absence of human presence does not go unnoticed; rather, her assiduous technique appears both appropriate and highly expressive. The images suggest a nexus where people once gathered and silently embody a language we can sense but no longer fully comprehend. Her photographs seem to lead a life of their own, exuding a tactile and sculptural sense of space that reflects the passage of time. She acknowledges a Fauvist tendency towards shape and colour through careful refinement and regrouping. Rich in melancholic existentialism, these places are not only full of ancient life; they are themselves alive. Yet whether this life is the result of an inherent myth or is, like the great cathedrals, the sum of invested belief and centuries of pilgrimage it is hard to say. We often associate the modern in art with a breakdown of traditional decorum in Western culture, but to describe a work of art as modernist is to make a finer distinction: to recognise its appearance as expressive of certain critical commitments and attitudes maintained by the artist herself towards both contemporary culture and the art of the recent past.
Emer O’Brien b. Dublin, Ireland. Lives and works in London and Athens.
Emer O’Brien b. Dublin, Ireland. Lives and works in London and Athens.