EMER O’BRIEN
Solstice Walk: Wormholes, Graves & Other Matters of Islington
20.06.26 from 17:00
Join artist Emer O’Brien for a solstice walk through Islington’s buried histories.
Beginning at KELDER with a viewing of The Matter of Islington, this artist-led walk and talk will explore the strange territory where local folklore, archaeology, ecology and memory overlap. Taking inspiration from Charles Darwin’s final book on earthworms, participants will consider the hidden labour taking place beneath the city streets: the worms quietly turning matter into soil, burying traces of the past and reshaping the ground beneath our feet.
As we move through Islington, we will visit sites that inform the exhibition, collecting rubbings from manhole covers, gravestones and other overlooked surfaces while tracing stories of cattle routes, local legends, market traders, forgotten residents and the materialhistories embedded within the city.
Itinerary:
17:00 – Viewing of The Matter of Islington at KELDER Projects
17:30 – Culpeper Community Garden
17:45 – Chapel Market walk, with a stop at M. Manzes Pie & Mash for refreshments
18:00 – Sainsbury’s, Liverpool Road
18:15 – St Mary’s Church Gardens, including grave rubbing and discussion
19:00 – Finish at The Alpaca Pub, Essex Road
Part walking tour, part field research, part collective act of remembering, the walk invites participants to consider how places record their histories—and how those histories continue to live beneath our feet.
Please wear suitable footwear and bring paper and a soft pencil, graphite stick or wax crayon if you would like to make rubbings.
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.