Golden Thread Gallery is excited to host Irish artist Niamh O’Malley in our main space after the hugely successful Gather, Ireland at Venice 2022. Gather was the national representation of Ireland at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. The exhibition for the Golden Thread Gallery, opening in April 2023, is informed by O’Malley’s work for Gather and will explore the breadth of her current practice.

O’Malley’s work has often been described as ‘a call to gather’. As her work makes its way around the island, this call to gather invites a communality. O’Malley’s sculpture and moving image works are intended to hold us in the space for which they are made. She uses steel, limestone, wood, and glass, and shapes and assembles objects to create a purposeful landscape of forms in the gallery space. Her sculptures, tall and free-standing, ground-bearing and cantilevered, with paced and looped moving image, inhabit and animate the gallery.

The work in the exhibition splits the space with sculptural interventions. Steels rods which support sculptural objects have to be navigated, forcing us to move around, and in-between. These interventions encourage us to consider the space again, from new angles and through different, considered, frames.

 “It is both lure and demand, for touch, encounter, and occupancy… a place of thresholds, windows, glass, holes, drains, vents, and a glimmer of water and daylight. O’Malley’s sculptures gesture towards enabling, offering protection, conveying sensations of touch, and more – of grabbing, holding, caressing surfaces, offering a moment of tether and precarious poise.”

Gather La Biennale di Venezia, 2022. Curated by the Temple Bar Gallery + Studios Curatorial Team.

Niamh O’Malley was born in Co. Mayo, and lives in Dublin, Ireland. She has made numerous major exhibitions in recent years including The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; Bluecoat, Liverpool; RHA, Dublin; Lismore Castle Arts; Grazer Kunstverein. Niamh O’Malley studied in Belfast, lived there for over ten years and was part of the early days of Catalyst Arts. She returns to present a selection of her moving image and sculptural work in the large industrial spaces of the Golden Thread Gallery.