Footfalls

BRITTA RETTBERG Gallery, Group exhibition curated by Yara Sonseca Mas with Bassam Al-Sabah, Laura Gannon, Lauren Gault, Alan Magee, Alice Maher, Mairead O’hEocha, and Niamh O’Malley,and Laura Ní Fhlaibhín. See Britta Rettberg Gallery for full images

macalla (echo 1), 2024 Empty mineral buckets, glass, glass jug, mechanical metronome, two hydrophones, Scarlett audio device, intelligent speakers, cabling, metal fixture, metal rope, metal base, water
macalla (echo 2), 2024, Mineral bucket lid, metal fixture, hand twisted reed rope (Ireland)
macalla (echo 3), 2024, Metronome, metal fixture, hand twisted reed rope (Ireland)
macalla (echo 4), 2024, Mineral bucket, metal fixture, hand twisted reed rope (Ireland)

Text Yara Sonseca Mas
The installation specifically created for the exhibition puts together several elements’ characteristic of recent Gault works.

Buckets are brightly coloured, multi-voiced characters in the unknown bound of the unit field. An early technology, the bucket is a perfect mobile sculpture and a sign of human presence, even in its absence.

Buckets are small islands, carrying element across element, water to land, land to water, minerals to animals.This connective quality is equally present in the cabling that brings speaker and receiver together, all through the sound system which links buckets and their content to the gallery and back.

Un-lidded, the hydrophobic mineral contents of the buckets are licked and ingested by animals. Here, the aural contents of the room are heard and voiced through the hydrophonic microphones suspended in water. In the lid of the bucket a calendar can be found to register the rhythm in which its content was or will be distributed.

Metronomes punctuate time in an attempt to hold the present, as spectral footsteps.

The objects reflect each other in their forms and functions, in the gallery and beyond. Collectively, they hold ´Echo´ across time and place, evolving with each gallery encounter.