EMER O’BRIEN
The Matter of Islington
12.05.26–16.08.26
The Matter of Islington is a site-responsive installation that examines the relationship between place, memory, material transformation and local history. Developed specifically for KELDER, the exhibition draws on archival research, oral histories, urban folklore and the social fabric of Islington to explore how histories are formed, preserved and continually rewritten.
The project takes its title from the dual meaning of “matter" itself: both physical substance and subject of concern. Throughout the exhibition, history is approached not as a fixed narrative but as a living material process—something that accumulates, decomposes, circulates and regenerates over time.
Research for the project began with material gathered from the London Metropolitan Archives, Islington Local History Centre and local sources. Tracing centuries of activity around Chapel Market and the surrounding streets, O'Brien encountered a landscape shaped by trade routes, cattle markets, public houses, religious movements, local businesses, myths, legends and generations of everyday lives. Beneath the contemporary city lies another Islington: one formed through countless layers of human and non-human activity.
A key conceptual influence is Charles Darwin's final publication, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms (1881). In this often-overlooked work, Darwin argued that earthworms are among the most important agents in shaping the surface of the earth. Through their continuous labour, they transform organic matter into fertile soil, bury archaeological remains and quietly alter landscapes over vast stretches of time. For Darwin, history was not only written by people; it was also produced by the persistent work of living systems beneath our feet.
At the centre of the exhibition stands a functioning wormery that operates simultaneously as sculpture, archive and ecological system. Visitors are invited to contribute copies of photographs, documents, stories, memories and other fragments connected to Islington. These contributions become food for the worms, entering a cycle of decomposition and renewal. Through this process, personal and collective histories are transformed into compost, producing a nutrient-rich liquid fertiliser that will support future growth.
The wormery functions as both monument and anti-monument. Rather than preserving history in a static form, it proposes an alternative model in which remembrance depends upon transformation. Memory is not stored intact but continually reworked through acts of exchange, loss, decay and regeneration.
Surrounding this central structure is an evolving field of research material. Archival photographs, maps, newspaper clippings, historical documents and handwritten notes reveal connections between local events, urban myths and cultural histories. The installation deliberately retains traces of the artist's research process, allowing visitors access to the accumulation of ideas, discoveries and associations that continue to shape the work throughout the project.
An accompanying soundscape extends this investigation through time. Voices, music, local dialects, historical references and fragments of cultural memory converge to create an auditory portrait of Islington. The work moves fluidly between documented history and folklore, connecting figures, places and events across centuries while reflecting the ongoing social life of the area.
The project also incorporates a series of ceramic vessels produced in fine bone china. The material carries its own local resonance. Developed in eighteenth-century London, bone china relies upon animal bone ash, linking it to the cattle that once passed through Islington on their way to the city's markets. Decorated with daffodil imagery grown using the artist's own vermicompost, the vessels reference the “Angels of Islington"—the flower sellers who worked in Chapel Market during the Edwardian era and became a distinctive part of the area's social history.
Throughout the exhibition, O'Brien considers how places are continually produced through the interaction of human experience, ecological processes and collective memory. History emerges not as a sequence of completed events but as an ongoing conversation between what has been inherited and what remains to be made.
As the project unfolds, visitors become participants in this process. Their contributions enter the installation, altering both its physical composition and its evolving archive. In this way, The Matter of Islington remains unfinished: a living system in which stories, materials and memories continue to circulate, decay and generate new forms.
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.