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TEELING AND TAYLOR: 
in the glow of a frozen flame

17 May – 21 July
4. CHARCOAL
During drawing class in the Sculpture Gallery, a collective energy took place. They drew casts of Greek statues. Little spaces between the tip of the student’s charcoal and the surface of the paper carried a force. This bag of energy remained in place between the two objects until the charcoal touched the paper. If this was visible, it would look like lots of fireflies in the room. Some appearing and disappearing at different times. All sharing a vitalness as the space between a fist and flesh in a boxing match. 1Dry sweat. Staining the page. Quick marks, capturing a limb in luck and confidence. The students’ gaze was another force that took place. Their feet firmly on trades of slate. 2If these gazes could be seen, they would look like laser beams. Tracing the outline and invisible centre line -- keeping together serpents and Laocoon. The gazes materialised in the colour of the lookers’ eyes. Greens, flecks of yellow, blues, browns cut through the room. Multiple lines of certainty, intention, peace and trust. Trust in the productivity of a look. Time bent, tumbled and stalled during the drawing sessions. The blank page had the power to reorientate a statue. Drawn upside down, in the pit of time. Or close up, or deliberately incorrect as a form and correct as a sight. On a quiet Tuesday, little pieces of energy magnetically formed large black masses of charcoal columns. They slowly continued to grow and move out from the gallery windows. At conveyor belt pace, ten blocks emerged, one from each window. In their own agency. There was nothing threatening about them. Their presence evoked a subtle assertion of what was happening inside. Marks being made. Observation at its most precise. They came out directly at the height of the windows and they turned at a right angle, gently landing and rooting themselves into the pavement. Interior, durational gestures were now supporting the building. Time could be touched. Like giant, spilling, black pupils coming out of ten of the building’s many eyes. Their synchronised movement and presence created a sense of forged tranquillity. Yet they conjured a vague smell of charred buildings from years prior and to come. 3After their first landing, they were accepted as new fixtures. A part of Emmet Place and the building. A part of the college and everyone around it – their scale and thickness had confidence. A rotund yet elegant insistence. Visible moments of excitable bursts and multiplications of casts of stillness and invisible intentions. Every month or so, they would gradually dissolve and at particular moments, they shared the formal properties of trees. They then renewed into columns again. Sometimes they were graffitied – a needed excess of creative activity. When the columns appeared, without question, Mr. B navigated them in a snake-like figure of eight. He continued onto the pedestrian street, tracing the sparks and feathers with his fingertips. In a contained joy, he walked in the shape of the design of his railings in the making. He diligently joined public gatherings when the columns fully disappeared. They were monthly rituals to hold what was deemed to be untouchable. A witness is still. A gaze is frantic.
1. On 6th March 1922 an Anti-Treaty IRA Boxing Match took place at the Cork Opera House. On 9th March 1923 a Pro-Treaty IRA Boxing match took place in the same venue.

2. Before The Crawford Municipal Technical Institute was built it was a site for trading Valentia slate.

3. On 11-12th December 1920 fifty-seven premises in Cork City were burned down by a fire set by British Crown Forces during the Irish War of Independence; on 10th August 1949 the large mattress and quilt factory Booth & Fox and neighbouring businesses went on fire; on 12th December 1955 the Cork Opera House was destroyed by a fire due to an electrical fault. Life drawing in the Crawford Sculpture Gallery continued during these events.

Audio performance by Pretty Happy.
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