With Sin Corner, Ben Reilly populates the calm neo-classical interior of Triskel’s Christchurch with its flipside – a collection of darkly surreal objects that thumb their noses at the decorous rationality of the architecture. Among the serried pews and columns swim shoals of inky black rockets, funerary barques filled with gummy pink dental plastic, skeletal fragments bound together and partially gilded. At first, these uncanny, bituminous works appear to have bubbled up from the crypt below but Reilly has a way with material that confounds initial impressions.

A self-described magpie, he collects, casts and recombines objects that are ‘shiny’ to him,and are drawn from various historical moments, ranging from dusty Victorian to 1950s kitsch. These objects are often symbolically potent; blimps, skulls and guns, but although they appear at first glance to be weighty and metallic, they are in fact made from densely pigmented wax. Light, malleable and buoyant, wax can trap and fx every surface impression, every nuance of texture, fold, pleat and scratch. Rather than mordant memento-mori the resulting works speak of a fascination with the way in which the character of a familiar, or loaded object can be changed utterly when re-made in a different substance.

The school of suspended bombs and zeppelins are cartoon-like and defused, their tarry surface puckered and dimpled, snagging the eye, making one aware of their materiality. The Enfeld rifle recast in soft wax is oddly deadened or neutralised, its ersatz nature revealed by the seams and traces of its mold, it becomes instead an elegant aggregate of cylinders. Likewise, Tank’s spindly, budding form contrasts the mineral surface of its fattened skull with the intricate whorls and webbing of a fully fleshed hand, its minute transcription of surface allowing us to study the richly various material facts of corporeality, demystifying the base similarities of our bodily existence.

Undercutting the darkness of his work – literal darkness, as much of the pieces are rendered in dense, light absorbing black – is an irreverent, subversive humour, as evidenced by the bulbous red clown-nose fixed to Man’s pale and gaping death mask, or Tank’s rubbery bondage costume. Similarly, a gleeful absurdity percolates through the melancholy of works such as Familiars, which could be a collection of some stranger’s intimate affects, including a truncated fish head and a strangely etiolated dog, head obscured by a cone but for the tip of his muzzle. This merry ambiguity brings to mind Russian writer Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the seditious power of the carnival where laughter and excess push aside the seriousness and hierarchies of ‘offcial’ life.

Reilly’s distinctive sensibility, his hybrid conflations of contradictory elements resonate with subversive wit and are made even more acute in this decorous setting, studded with memorials to Cork’s great and good citizens.

Sarah Kelleher.

The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectation, Mark Fisher, Ghosts of the My Life.

A few weeks ago I wrote a column that made reference to a theorist who died tragically in January and an artwork that was given to me as a present from a colleague and friend. The theorist is Mark Fisher and my attraction to his writings comes from his ongoing emphasis on a weariness that we’re living through culturally. Fisher wrote with much passion about the lack of the new that pervades contemporary Western culture; in its preoccupation with retro, with the already done, and focused on a weariness that seems endemic to our current cultural constellation: a consequence of what he famously called the ‘slow cancellation of the future.’

I return from walking the grounds of Glenstal Abbey, near where I live, and I start a fire in my sitting room. The phone rings and it’s the artist ‘Ben Reilly.’ We talk about the column I’d written and other pieces and he wonders whether I’d be interested in writing about his upcoming show. I’m weary, tired, and a little short of inspiration. But later I begin thinking about Ben’s use of materials that seem genuinely old in his sculptures, as in curiously old, and his preoccupation with weary figures, that seems all too aware of the weariness Fisher is – in his writing – trying to combat. Ben is working against the impulse to zoom in on the past as if it is something we can just dip into at will. Instead, he wants us to think about the old, not as a condition of what can be done again, the reworking of an influence that comes from the past, but as an ambience, a feel; that of a world not ours yet there still: within touching distance.

The world stepped into when we explore Ben’s work is made up of things, materials, objects, stuff. Is it a door handle? A leather boot? A bag of materials that looks like but isn’t quite coal? Does it matter? These are old things. But the sense of the old is that of time as something pure. Unlike the reworking of the past we find in so much popular culture, this is a sensuous oldness; we want to touch and explore. We want to feel the object of time itself. The installation Zeppelin is one example. The title refers to the object of the zeppelin itself with all its historical associations. But when engaging the sculpture, we are drawn to its clunky feel, its use of essentially old materials, bringing us back to that sensuous oldness that is not the past but time.

Another example is Bladderhead, a head cast of a weary, beaten down man; his eyes shut as if turning away from the sparkling newness of a world that confronts him at every turn. Perhaps this man is defeated by the glittering objects that surround him; the weariness he feels because of this. This weary figure pervades Ben’s practice across media. It feels as if he’s shutting his eyes in the hope that he can retreat into a world where the old is not the past but the shimmer of time itself. I wonder if this man is Ben, weary with this world and therefore making another. Or maybe he represents a part of me that wants to tune out of the present, if only for a moment. But then a light bulb goes off and I think that Bladderhead is in fact us all, cast in that cultural constellation Fisher writes about as so obsessed with recycling the past, and therefore looking to retreat into a world both sensuous and old: the feeling of time itself.

Dara Waldron.

Dara Waldron lectures in Critical and Contextual Studies at Limerick School of Art and Design. He is the author of Cinema and Evil: Moral Responsibility and the “Dangerous” Film, and is currently working on his second book for Bloomsbury, New York. He is the author of the fortnightly column Art Encounters, for Headstuff.ie, which explores how we respond to the everyday experience of art objects.

Breath: 2016 filmed in Berlin and Cork.
Super Eight Black and White Digital Film with Sound Work by Giordai Ua Laoghaire.

Breath started out as a reference to a picture postcard showing a photograph of a Zeppelin flying over the Brandenburg gate in 1905. I was struck by how futuristic looking the image was and how it must have seemed to the viewer at the time. This take on the postcard was my initial start.

Using the ruins of Kaiser Wilhelm memorial Church in Berlin for the skyline and splicing that with a film of a piece of Steel Sculpture that I made to look slightly Zeppelin like, filmed in Cork. While filming the skyline In Berlin I became interested in the clouds and the idea for the sound on the film came out of this observation and the thought of what sound a cloud would make if it was possible to hear, and the sound for Breath was developed with that question. The cloud is air going through different currents and temperatures is still made up of Air and so the idea of one breath was the continuous breath of the cloud.

Through sound recording techniques my one breath was stretched and pushed through a grill like process (granular synthesis) and those stretches thrown back on itself so that if the sound pattern was a visible shape it would resemble a cigar or Zeppelin like form, so one continuous breath never ending.

Ben Reilly.

The Piece that became Dust started in early 2016 when casting envelopes and milk cartons in wax. Then while on a residency in Berlin in august 2016 I began casting fist sized cobble stones, that were used as footpaths and could often be found loose on the streets; enabling their other use as missiles in countless street riots / protests throughout History.

I combined the cobblestones with casts of paper bags also found in Berlin; like an American grocery bag.

Rectangular in shape and ranging from the larger bags at 50 x 25 x 15 cm to smaller ones at 25 x 15 x 10 cm.

Some of the larger bags I attached a cast of a particulate hinged and handled piece of wood, perhaps like a jerry can or an ammunition box but dented and very impractical.

The stones and bags were cast with wax mixed with Ground soot and black pigment. There is something about the weight of the stones in the different size bags that give each one an individual presence and together these objects make up a landscape that I used in different configurations depending on the venues.

Ben Reilly.

Ben Reilly’s studio is an onslaught of memory. Bodiless heads, amputated stumps of things that once lived, maybe, reside alongside remnants of weaponry, begging to speak from the past. The whole suggests, to my mind, the aftermath of catastrophe. My initial reaction was to go back to W. G. Sebald’s Air War and Literature to affirm the relationship I immediately formed between the studio and Sebald’s attempt to work out the repression of Germany’s memorialising after the Allied bombings of the country during World War II. Sebald dwelt on the charred natural and manmade scapes, the remnants of terrain shaped by human life, the remnants of human bodies, present but past. Like Sebald’s gathering of memory fragments in words and photographs, Reilly gathers them in drawings, prints, photographs and most of all, sculpture. His studio is a sophisticated space, a memory bank where memory emanates not from death, specifically, but from some deep-rooted fascination with manmade detritus, of things touched, shaped, destroyed and remade by human intervention. They are, as Aleida Assmann put it, ‘agents of haunting’.

This mnemonic character, seen most recently in works such as Islands (GlogauAIR, Berlin, 2017) continues in Graft. The seed of Graft, made of wax dyed near-black, took physical shape by making a number of casts of a trumpet bell which placed bell-end down, initially resembled for the artist a thicket of sorts. Elements of the trumpet have found their way into Graft, where its sensuously smooth tubular form is married to delicate, brittle, tree-like bodies whose surfaces alternate between deeply pitted ravage and subtly gleaming smoothness that demands touch. With fascination, I watched as the artist hatched one of Graft’s components from its mould, carefully cutting through the cocoon of plaster and shiny pink latex. Closer inspection revealed textures of tree bark mingled with striated scars – but moulded rather than inflicted. Graft references a tree photographed by Reilly in Sougia, Crete, a former Roman site near where Allied soldiers were taken prisoner after German paratroopers overran the island during World War II. That the tree indicates a site of Axis destruction and Cretan resistance invoked the special significance of trees in former war zones as carriers of memory – numerous trees on the Gallipoli peninsula have been planted from the solitary Turkish pine that marked the site of the Battle of Lone Pine in 1915, and amputated trees symbolised the human toll in Paul Nash’s paintings of the World War I battlefield. The use of the trumpet is not merely playful, either. The artist recalled hearing the plaintive beauty of sounds played from damaged wind instruments found on centuries-old battlefields. Together, the elements of Graft become sentinels of the past, at once playful and mournful, an uneasy site of memory.

This is but one reading. Graft, part of the artist’s ongoing interrogation, is open and organic, even humorous in meaning. Resistant to easy interpretation, the power of Ben Reilly’s work is the artist’s deep awareness and sensitivity to objects, the individual relationships formed with them and the myriad connotations stirred by them. A self-confessed magpie, he is fascinated by surface, texture and form and, it would seem a primary concern, how objects and people, and our relationship to them, are affected by time.

Sometimes, silence is smarter than the urge to pin meanings onto art.

Ann Murray.