Glossaries for Forwardness (solo) | 27 April–23 September 2023 | Museum Building, Trinity College Dublin

Curated by Rachel Botha. Photography Kasia Kaminska | PRESS RELEASE (PDF) | PUBLIC PROGRAM PART 1 (PDF) | PUBLIC PROGRAM PART 2

Glossaries for Forwardness is a multi-platform project by Marie Farrington, examining convergences between landscape and memory through the architecture of the Museum Building in Trinity College Dublin. This project arose from Farrington’s artist residency at Trinity Centre for the Environment (2021–22) where her research approached geological sampling methods as ways to explore how landscape participates in its own representation and display.

The Museum Building (1853–57) is a seminal work of Ruskinian Gothic architecture. The building itself can be thought of as a geological collection; it is constructed from a vast catalogue of stone types. Glossaries for Forwardness presents site-responsive works installed throughout the foyer of the Museum Building. Sculptural and textile interventions present an extensive material glossary that reference the building’s interior, repurposing geological sampling methods such as thin-sectioning, microscopic imaging and resin-mounting into modes of making in the studio. In collaboration with Stanislaw Welbel, a spatial audio installation emanates from the ventilation shafts, composed on a synthesiser by translating the building’s various stones into a strata of layered sound.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with texts by Dr. Quentin Crowley, Anneka French and Marie Farrington, and a public engagement programme including talks, screenings, listening sessions and an event in collaboration with the Department of Ultimology. Glossaries for Forwardness offers an invitation to reimagine human relations to land, making space for the active agency of landscape to emerge. As deep-time materials intersect with momentary human gestures, the geological actions that formed the Museum Building’s architecture – layering, folding, stacking, accumulation and erasure – become concentrated in the act of making. The exhibition is a call for forwardness, a linear push across one state of being and into another, encouraging a critical engagement with the representative frameworks through which the climate crisis is mediated.