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Dublin, 2003
This project was conceived of as a participatory artwork, the results displayed in the installation pictured. The sofas in the display were sourced by the artist and re-covered using specially designed printed fabrics: one pattern was made from a bag of ‘Irish White Potatoes’ and the other from a text of the Irish Constitution, featuring articles on ‘Private Property’ and ‘The Home.’ These typical domestic objects came to function as a critique of ideas of comfortable nationalism, addressing notions of lifestyle and identity, and how such ideas are linked to physical and cultural consumption.
Six of these discarded sofas were recovered and repaired before being re-distributed as gifts to members of diverse Dublin communities: participants in the projects included a man living in a council flat who had been homeless, a Zimbabwean refugee and a Somalian butcher studying world banking. The gift was given in exchange for the documentation of the sofa in its new owner’s home, whose reading of what the sofa was and represented, served to highlight the rich territory of lifestyle practices the work was concerned with. Placed in the houses of strangers, the sofa explored the possibility of an art object that could become a catalyst for social interaction, with alternative audiences outside the gallery space it was ultimately represented in.
The installation was presented in a way that mimicked a typical 'showroom' aesthetic. This commercial presentation disguised a process that was rooted in a gift economy. Other material in the installation included a book of printed documentation that included texts from anthropological sources, produced fabric sample books, and a glossy magazine, 'Ireland's Homes and Interiors', featuring an interview with the artist about the project.
Exhibited at:
EV+A, Limerick, 2004, curated by Zdenka Badovinac
Texts:
Bryonie Reid, 'Creating Counterspaces: identity and the home in Northern Ireland and Ireland', in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space in December 2007
Ciara Finnegan, EV+A, review in CIRCA 108, summer 2004
Zdenka Badinovac, catalogue essay, EV+A Imagine Limerick, Gandon Editions, ISBN 0946846 197, published 2004
