EMER O’BRIEN
The Matter of Islington
12.05.26–16.08.26
You don’t see a lot of cows in Islington these days. But spool back a few hundred years and this rural spot on the outskirts of London was the main thoroughfare for farmers and their cattle on the way to the big city markets.
The roads through here… well, you can imagine. Not suitable for gentleman mystics on their weekly pilgrimage to Merlin’s Cave (ale sold by the flagon). So, Chapel Street, as it was known before it became Chapel Market, became one of the earliest paved roads in London.
And under those stone slabs, under those ancient, plodding feet and hooves, reign the true kings/queens of the planet – the top of the food chain. Humans? Lions? Tigers? Bears? Oh no. Earthworms.
So that’s where we begin.
The Matter of Islington sees Emer O’Brien in residence, turning the underground space at KELDER into a laboratory and research space drawing inspiration from material found at London Metropolitan Archive, the Islington Archive and localism.
And localism is…? Everywhere you look around here: generations-old fruit ’n’ veg stalls, community gardens, family-run boozers and the market itself – still going strong more than a hundred years since it grew organically out of Islington people’s need to buy, sell, eat, meet and chew the fat.
KELDER favours extended durational projects to allow the work to develop and change whilst giving the viewer the opportunity to witness such developments. Here, the durational production is in two parts:
Ceramics made with bone ash china – a process invented in the East End that used the powdered remains of the animals that once shambled through these streets.
Compost created with the help of red wiggler worms. Visitors are invited to contribute by offering the worms paper printed with stories from Islington’s history. The result is a local, enriched tea that will encourage the history of this place to grow.
The Matter of Islington continues Emer O’Brien’s series of installations based on the four elements.
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.