Daniel Tuomey: Stuck, a decomposition

Stuck here in the throat of this chimney, the chimney of a house passed down through generations, through generations of this family and of other families, of other institutions, of merchants, accountants, solicitors, phone shops, care homes, slum tenants and slum landlords, billiard halls and art galleries, working men’s clubs and old man pubs, charities, restaurants, museums, city council offices. Stuck with the thousand voices that haunt this voice, with the thousand voices that haunt these walls, rammed into the ruins of colonial capitalism, entombed in the cold damp carcinogenic waste products of three hundred years of fossil fuel burning.
– Daniel Tuomey, 2025
Ormston House presents Stuck, a decomposition, a solo exhibition by Daniel Tuomey.
Although Georgian houses are a familiar sight in much of the Irish urban landscape, they are rarely thought of outside the antagonistic paradigms of a barrier to progress or a conservational responsibility. Conceived in response to the built heritage of Limerick, this exhibition encourages a deeper consideration of the impact that these houses, their spatial principles and aesthetic conventions, have had upon the Irish psyche. In particular Stuck, a decomposition is a rumination upon how these edifices are a constant reminder of our colonial past and our uncertain future.
Using sculpture, drawing, and vocal performance, Daniel Tuomey dissects and recomposes the collapsing cultural inheritances we are stuck with. The exhibition centres around a narrator trapped in the chimney of a Georgian townhouse.
A disintegrating Hiberno-English voice resonating through the walls of a dilapidated colonial structure becomes the vessel for a broad cast of characters, reflecting on a struggle to articulate a future under the crushing material weight of history. Through these varied registers, the voice proposes a series of metaphorical and material explanations of its position. The soundwork is played through customised computer software which reorders the elements of the narrative in each telling, such that the same rambling ‘explanation’ is attempted again and again, with different directions and digressions each time.
Hauntingly, our narrator’s position references the history of child labour in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that saw children, predominantly young boys, working as chimney-sweeps. As Ormston House’s Historian-in-Residence Sharon Slater has discovered, an eight-year-old chimney sweep died after becoming lodged in the chimney in 1846 in the building where Ormston House now stands.
A potential escape passage from this construction presents itself in the absent presence of the Irish language. From this tragicomic position, the voice narrates the complex history of Georgian houses in Ireland, from their inception as domestic architecture at the end of the plantations through their transformative history as tenements, ruins, offices, institutions, and domestic spaces once again.
This fragmented history – which our trapped narrator shares – is related through half-true family stories, folkloric tangents, phonological digressions, fossil-fuel-encrusted nightmares, and hallucinogenic memories of a neoliberal childhood. Much of the material for this chronicle is spun from Tuomey’s own biography and that of his antecedents who hailed from Limerick. Figures from these stories coalesce in a series of charcoal drawings, taking on smoky, mouldy, provisional form, an alternative family tree tracking the speculative genealogy of a voice.
This new installation for Ormston House builds on Tuomey’s long-standing interest in the psychology and mythology of domestic space and Irish architectural traditions. Ultimately, this exhibition positions a particular, middle-class Irish voice as a tense and untenable junction of linguistic trajectories, laced with shame and bravado, trapped within decomposing structures it feels no ownership over.
A programme of free events accompanies Stuck, a decomposition. Full details to follow.
Daniel Tuomey was born in Dublin and currently lives and works in Rotterdam. He is a graduate of both the National College of Art and Design, Dublin and the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, In 2021, he completed the NEF Animation Residency at Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud, Fontevraud Abbey.
Recent exhibitions include Control Centre Charlois at Pallas Projects / Studios, Dublin, 2023; Frankenstein at Available & The Rat, Rotterdam, 2021; Y O U N G F O S S I L at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2021 and 2022; and Performance Art and Sound Event Celebrating 5 Years of RAAR at Het Wilde Weten, Rotterdam, 2021.
Stuck, a decomposition is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and Limerick Arts Office. It is also partly made possible by the Mondriaan Fund, the public fund for visual art and cultural heritage in the Netherlands.
Limerick City