Critique | Martina O’Brien ‘draft fissure’ 

Galway Arts Centre 

12 April – 25 May 2024

The protagonist in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea (Chatto & Windus, 1978) says that “time, like the sea, unties all knots.” Captured, legislated, yet unfathomable, the sea appears as both documented and ungraspable in Martina O’Brien’s recent exhibition, ‘draft fissure’, at Galway Arts Centre. Across ten works, in a range of media, developed through a UCD Parity Studios residency with iCRAG (Ireland Research Centre in Applied Geosciences), the artist brings together attempts to capture and exploit oceanic life through legislation, technology and scientific measurement.

On the ground floor, tracings (2024) features three greyscale animations roving over seascapes on ten-inch tablets accompanied by an eerie, quiet soundtrack, and in submerged point cloud 2 (2024), a series of LED panels greet visitors. These overhead views give way to stories of exploration in a six-channel video, accounts of immersion (2023). This work combines grainy archival footage of the launch of John Wilson and George Colquhoun’s Pisces III submersible, dubbed by the narrator as a “big event in modern science”, and the sombre account of its later recovery from the seabed, after becoming dislodged from its mothership, which jostles with the artists’ own high-res footage of brilliantly coloured coral reefs.

The exhibition’s titular piece, draft fissure (2023), in the ground-floor gallery’s last room, comprises a series of mini projectors over Perspex sheets, stacked atop old seismological charts, documenting oceanic extraction off Ireland’s west coast that mimic enlarged microscope slides. These silent, looped projections show deep sea mining procedures that are currently the subject of calls for a temporary pause from nations (including Ireland), scientists, environmentalists, and indigenous peoples.

Upstairs, the connections between deep sea and space exploration are more explicit. Slow resound (2023) places the viewer in a black, custom constructed chair to watch a looped video. Here, the scale seems impossible to pinpoint, the net undulating across the screen at once vast and fine. Two installations in the central room upstairs reiterate this approach: pay zone (2023) and transition zone (2024) comprise clipboards, bulging with seismological charts on acetate, alongside copies of the Law of the Sea and guidelines governing space exploration, respectively. On the opposite wall, between poison and cure models for extra-terrestrial ecologies (2024), featuring unglazed porcelain and coral and a 3D-printed sculptural model, and of antique (or sun-shy) sea (2023), frame the Georgian fireplace.

A ten-minute video, Daggertooth (2023), focuses on moments of labour, showing the backs of Hi-Vis clad workers, hauling nets and cleaning decks, their hands sorting through still-living marine creatures, as the radio plays faintly in the background. This return to the quotidian is a reminder that the processes of exploring, examining, and extracting from the sea continuously unfold. 

Where eco-critical art often attempts to prompt action through utopian or dystopian reimagining of the future, or where STEM-funded projects domesticate data by transforming it into music or immersive visuals, O’Brien takes a different route. In untangling the knotty data narratives we construct about unknown and unknowable frontiers, O’Brien frames our hope for salvation through science as akin to eucatastrophe – a neologism coined by J.R.R. Tolkien meaning a sudden or miraculous reversal of the fairy-tale hero’s fortunes, otherwise known as a happy ending. This is an exhibition about envisioning the Atlantic; however, like the work beneath the surface that it exposes, ‘draft fissure’ is equally an (at times uncomfortable) envisioning of ourselves. 

Dr Lucy Elvis is a curator, writer and philosopher who teaches at the University of Galway.