Press for The Pattern Exchange at Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin

The Pattern Exchange, curated by Rosie Lynch and Hollie Kearns, nods to Temple Bar Gallery’s early history as a shirt factory. But they take the notion of a pattern well beyond its use in sewing and clothing manufacture. They seem to have in mind the evolution of Temple Bar as a living, urban quarter over time, an evolving site for various overlapping activities, different kinds of production and recreation. Their use of the word “pattern” relates to an influential 1977 book on urban architecture, design and community, A Pattern Language. The book, idealistic and co-operative in spirit, proposed an alternative mode of planning and living, based on communal problem-solving and self-determination, and envisages communities as networks of concentric, interlocking and overlapping patterns…

Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times, 17 February 2015, read the review here.

Sarah Browne elucidates historical precedence on ‘how surplus time is exploited in contemporary life’ with an accomplished pairing of artefacts. A curious leather pouch stuffed with horse-hair is revealed as a Shetland Island knitting belt, used to enable the female wearer to carry out one-handed knitting, thus freeing up the second hand to engage in other forms of concurrent labour. Meanwhile, a subdued but regular ticking is audible from the wall-mounted Zero Hour Contract (2013) – a modified clock, whose workings have been obscured by black leatherette held taut within its circular steel rim. Resembling a total solar eclipse, the pensive haloed disc summons both primeval natural rhythms and contemporary labour patterns to address the impossibility of ever ‘clocking off’. Viewed alongside the studio object, the shadowy portal actively functions as a black hole in the myth that pressurized multi-tasking is a modern-day, technological or urban phenomenon.

Joanne Laws, Art Monthly, March 2015 no. 384

The Pattern Exchange runs til 28 March 2015.