Golden Thread Gallery is excited to present Phillip McCrilly’s first solo show in our Project Space in January 2023. Curated by Mary Stevens, I Can Never Nail the Days Down explores “gender socialisation, considered ideas around home, as well as the potential for a fulfilled queer life in a rural Irish context.”

The work questions McCrilly’s own relationship with the post conflict period, intimacy and research into the connection of people and place. Attention to detail and his aesthetic of ‘process driven’ work highlights a unique responsiveness and sensitivity to the nature of public spaces becoming personal (and vice versa).

Confronted with a large catering fridge containing homemade edible preserves, McCrilly uses his skill as a chef and the aesthetic of an artist to explore the tensions between public and personal spaces. I Can Never Nail the Days Down includes visual, edible and scented work designed to challenge community memory and the associations we have with everyday spaces, smells and objects.

“Navigating itself between fixed research, stories of individual biography, and collective memory, my work recuperates overlooked histories and marginal figures. Mobilising subjective instability, camp sensibility, fermentation, and personal experience, ‘I can never nail the days down’ traces historical networks of kinship and affection, offering ciphers for the voluble potential of the past.

Considering foraging and cruising as likeminded deviant practices, and exploring how masculinities in the North can be termed as queer in defying preconceived notions of masculine identity and performance, pleasure is acknowledged as a radical form of political resistance. Attempting to distil and trace the passage of an object’s life through a process of free association, abstract musings gain traction and grounding through biographical connection in the exploration of queer desire within the ‘post-conflict’ period in the North.“

P. McCrilly, November 2022

Curator Mary Stevens comments:

“I have wanted to work with Phillip for a long time. He has a beautiful eye for detail and a very rich artistic skill set. In recent years he has experimented with event based practice, a hugely successful café/artist collective and curatorial projects. It was a privilege to work with him to develop this unique exhibition as a thoughtful refection of his past projects, but also an opportunity for us both to take the time and space to think about the stories, anecdotes and details behind his practice. I’m very pleased to be part of ‘I Can Never Nail the Days Down’ and I look forward to seeing what he creates in the future.”