Foreign Objects is an exhibition of works by Robert Anderson, Laura Eldret, and Florian Roithmayr; artists that share a concern with the ways that physical processes and human interactions become estranged from – or embedded in – the objects that they produce. 

Foreign Objects includes videos, textiles and fabric-based sculptures by Laura Eldret that explore the rug-making traditions of a Zapotec community in Mexico. Amongst these works are large, colourful weavings that have been co-designed by the artist and the craftspeople that she encountered during her research, the weavings symbolising a ‘receipt of exchange’ with these local makers. In the film The Juicers, she explores how the interactions of the community become channeled through physical materials, colours, flavours, sounds, and sense of place. Eldret’s hanging fabric sculptures, titled Gateways, present the juice bag – a container of locally-produced fruit juice which is a recurring image in the video work – as a motif representing her collaboration with the weavers.

Robert Anderson creates sculptures and installations that unfold from the starting point of a source image. These works become an arrangement that he describes as an ‘image index’ or ‘tableau’, often bringing together elements from modernism and classicism. In the exhibition at CCA, Anderson’s use of materials such as marble and velvet speak of the fleshy corporeality of Roman sculpture or the funereal drapery of the catafalque structures that are used to support coffins; the resulting work suggesting the absent body and the architecture of display.

Florian Roithmayr’s sculptural work embraces the unexpected consequences of one material being set in relation to another. A range of materials with competing properties (foam, clay, steel, concrete, paper) imprint themselves upon one another through processes of moulding, casting, dry-setting and gravitational contact. Among his works for Foreign Objects are sculptures that have been produced on-site at CCA over an 8-day period, which – like other works in the exhibition – carry the traces of human-object and inter-object exchange that has been shaped over time.

Foreign Objects is generously supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. CCA also wish to thank Lamont Stone for their support.