Mandy O’Neill: Best Laid Plans
Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin
★★★★☆
Best Laid Plans, the fruit of Mandy O’Neill’s practice-based PhD at Dublin City University, is spread over two floors of the Irish Architectural Archive. Intriguingly, this show is the latest offering in a spate of exhibitions by Dublin artists who have re-examined and expanded on materials gathered during the Covid-19 pandemic, including Shane Lynam’s Pebbledash Wonderland, at Photo Museum Ireland, last month. In O’Neill’s case, lockdown constrained her daily sojourns to the north Dublin suburb of Cabra.
The name Cabra, according to a beautifully designed exhibition leaflet, comes from the Irish word chabrach, meaning thicket, moor, waste or bad land. The area’s original infrastructure and housing estates were built between 1929 and 1948, necessitated by the housing crisis that gripped the city in the early 20th century. After the Dublin Lockout and the collapse of several tenement buildings on Church Street in 1913, Dublin Corporation – the precursor to Dublin City Council – held a town-planning competition to generate ideas for low-density suburban design. Patrick Abercrombie and his team were awarded first place for their submission, Dublin of the Future, and many elements of their submission influenced subsequent urban works in Cabra.
The history of Dublin’s built environment is a preoccupation of O’Neill’s exhibition, but the show is not a didactic or heavy-handed polemic about housing. Quite the opposite: her work impresses through understatement. Best Laid Plans wears its years of research and development lightly. Apart from the leaflet, there’s no other text, no other curatorial instruments that attempt to contextualise and explain. This restraint means that the exhibition relies exclusively on the co-ordinating visual materials and photographs to lead you from beginning to end. Consequently, by following your own instincts, you replicate the routine of O’Neill’s walks during lockdown, imitating the iterations and deviations of her meandering.
As opposed to traditional photography, the artist stages her work in three-dimensional builds. O’Neill’s spatialised photographic interventions lend to this sense of organic wandering: visitors have to weave their way through, navigating sculptural constructions across both floors. O’Neill lingers on construction sites, house fronts and street architecture, focusing on incidental configurations to create compellingly abstract forms. Grids proliferate throughout the imagery and populate the structure of the gallery’s environment.
A notable feature of lockdown work is its evocation of the feeling of timelessness that emerged during the pandemic. Without the regular schedule of events to anticipate or remember, the present inflated unnaturally and our sense of past and future diminished. When the great river of time is disrupted, smaller whirls and eddies come into focus: no longer linear, time appears as loops.
This sense of circularity is rife throughout O’Neill’s exhibition, reigniting the experience of lockdown but also providing the foundation for provocative political questions that creep up on you. The cyclical nature of Dublin’s housing crisis cannot fail to be recognised as the result of widespread and repeated government neglect. But there are more recent circuits, too: the last room contains the first diary entry that O’Neill made at the beginning of her lockdown walks. “Today is the US election between Trump and Biden – it’s not looking great.”
Best Laid Plans is at the Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin 2, until Friday, November 29th
