Sirius Arts Centre
24 January – 14 March;
Triskel Arts Centre
4 November 2025 – 30 April 2026
Emerging artist Elinor O’Donovan is a self-proclaimed digital native. Her work spans filmmaking, digital collage, installation, drawing, and sculpture. Across her current solo exhibition ‘Metametamorphosis’, curated by Miguel Amado at Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, she permits herself intuitive freewheeling and playful association with disparate technologies, blending them with analogue aesthetics and cultural tropes to pose questions about knowledge, memory, myth and truth.
The exhibition includes a series of framed digital photographic collages, which are flanked by sketchy, almost fugitive unframed drawings, all mounted on black gallery walls. The installation feels cavernous and resembles a giant mind-map, clustering around a large, floor-based, plywood-mounted screen. O’Donovan’s process is to assemble a broad array of elements and to focus on their interconnectedness, exploring how stories can shape understandings of ourselves and our environment. She reworks the genre of landscape, countering a post-digital reliance on screens by hand-building surreal and utopian environments, full of child-like wonder. There is a sense of fun and enclosure within these landscapes, into which cultural tropes, museum artifacts, scribbles, thought bubbles, and sigils converse and circulate.
The digital collages and drawings were inspired by and extend the HD video Metametamorphosis (2024), which is 5 minutes and 34 seconds in length. It begins with the mischievous invocation of Gregor Samsa, cockroach and protagonist of Kafka’s 1915 existential novella, The Metamorphosis. Samsa awakes after a restless night to discover that he’s turned into The Beatles – all of them at once. John, Paul, George and Ringo are loosely profiled, their likeness simulated using deep-fake software, dance moves and location association.
The faltering narrative dissolves into a soundtrack of groans and humming, emerging finally into the strains of The Beatles song, Here, There and Everywhere, sung by busker Jules Avalon in Central Park, New York. The imagery glitches until the viewer is forced to contend with a four-channel screen. Simultaneously, we are in India, New York, and a bedroom in Cork. There is a sense of entropy as we flit between these microcosms, puzzling over real and imaginary elements. Meanwhile, shipping traffic from Cork Harbour, framed in the gallery’s beautiful Italianate windows, flows by and is drawn into the installation; it all feels equivocal in a post-modern world, shaped by hyper-connectivity and economic and political insecurity.
O’Donovan also created the installation Winter Sun (2024), currently projected onto the façade of the Triskel Arts Centre for the winter months as part of Island City – Cork’s Sculpture Trail. Funded by Fáilte Ireland, with support from the National Sculpture Factory, the sculpture trail was initiated by Cork City Council in 2023 to commission six temporary public artworks for Cork city centre.
Winter Sun is a moving-image work that projects – and seasonally extends – the intergenerational practice of communal sundown worship. It depicts city dwellers gathering for summer sunset high on Patrick’s Hill at Bells Field in Cork – described by the artist as an iconic place of respite, with the best views of the city. A painting by John Butts, A View of Cork from Audley Place (c.1750), depicts the same scene and was the inspiration behind O’Donovan’s projection. In both works, time collapses as figures lounge in the gloaming, analogous silhouettes dissolving into glorious pink, green and golden tones. It’s a spiritually uplifting scene which recalls both Michel Foucault’s enigmatic concept of ‘heterotopia’ and Martin Heidegger’s ideas on ‘poetic dwelling’ – to live deeply by finding hope, wisdom and beauty in one’s surroundings. In winter darkness, Cork citizens are thus enriched and can comprehend why art is vital to their lives.
Jennifer Redmond is a multidisciplinary artist and writer based in Cork.
jenniferredmond.com
