Diagonal Acts is an ambitious new multi-platform project by Marie Farrington spanning 2025. Beginning at the entrance of Kunstverein Aughrim in Spring 2025, the project continues with public workshops at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin, and culminates with exhibitions at The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon and Commonage Projects, London.

‘Diagonal Acts’ refers to how diagonal lines are seen as ways to connect, divide and move across various places or ideas. The exhibition explores themes of memory, place and connection — exploring gaps, fragments and edges within archaeology, geology, sculpture and staged performance. There is a significant focus on how the human body connects to these themes. The exhibition includes sculptures made from a range of materials, including wax, stone, glass and steel.

The material outcomes in Diagonal Acts are supported by a range of collaborations, and connected by a public programme of generative elements devised to critically engage audiences in person and online, enhancing and expanding participation and access. These include —

• Illustrations of Marie’s artworks by archaeological illustrator Roisin O’Meadhra
• ‘Leaning & Lifting’, a text by writer Megan Mecedo
• A website for the project, created by graphic designer Alex Synge
• Sculptures inspired by excavation tools, made by various artists
• A steel sieve for sifting soil and a spade made from soil, created by Marie
• A sculptural wheelbarrow for transporting soil samples made by artist Liliane Puthod
• A blanket created utilising earthworm waste to nourish the soil, by Laura NíFhlaibhín

Diagonal Acts arises from research into geological and archaeological imaginations of gaps, openings and thresholds, exploring the boundaries of the body in the landscape from various counter-topographical perspectives.

The project expands on and elaborates a hybrid practice of ‘Theatre / Archaeology’ (Shanks / Pearson, 2001) exploring symmetries between staged presentations and field work via their continual renegotiation of categorical boundaries and their shared interest in memory, partiality, fragment, trace and assemblage.

Through intrinsically contingent material interventions and participatory gestures, Diagonal Acts excavates the ‘/’ in Theatre/Archaeology as a site of interdisciplinarity, convergence, and borders reworked, articulated through the sculptural position of the diagonal line. Thinking across and between sites through conditional modes of encounter, Diagonal Acts explores diagonality as a relational and collaborative stance, temporarily ‘leaning’ against contexts, communities and histories.

Diagonal Acts is curated by Kate Strain, Director of Kunstverein Aughrim.

Marie Farrington (1990, IE) is an Irish visual artist. Her practice reflects on the act of making through geological and archaeological lenses. Using casting, carving and other sculptural processes, she engages with memory through situated encounters with landscape and architecture. Her work makes formal reference to field sampling, built heritage and histories of display.

Recent public-realm projects include exhibitions include Guiding Light/Solas Treorach, permanent Percent for Art Commission, Ardgillan Community College (2024); Swim in the landscape, walk on the sea, permanent public commission, Skerries Art Trail (2023-24); and Glossaries for Forwardness, Museum Building, Trinity College Dublin (solo, 2023).

Recent exhibitions include Strata, CCA Derry-Londonderry (2024); The Unseen Eyebeam Crossed, puntWG Amsterdam (solo, 2024); Hammerheads, Solstice Arts Centre (2023); FAULTS+FOLDS, Oonagh Young Gallery (two-person, 2022); The Wave, Collecteurs: The Museum of Private Collections (2022); and A Vague Anxiety, Irish Museum of Modern Art (2019).

Residencies include Fire Station Artists’ Studios (2018-22), Centre for the Environment, Trinity College Dublin (2021-22); Dublin City Council’s Albert Cottages (2023), SEA Foundation Tilburg (2023), Ballinglen Museum of Art Fellowship Program (2024); and Atelier Wilhelmina Gasthuis, Amsterdam
(2024).

Marie is a Project Studio awardee at Temple Bar Gallery+Studios, Dublin (2024-25), a Research Associate at CCA Derry-Londonderry (2023-25) and a part-time lecturer at NCAD, Dublin. Her work is held in the permanent collections of The Arts Council of Ireland, Trinity Centre for the Environment, and the Office of Public Works.