WHAT is present & unadulterated in Laura Ní Fhlaibhín’s solo exhibition trailblazer at Pallas Projects Dublin is the low light, first caught in the yellowed latex sheet that flares like nostrils from a hospital rail over-hanging the door you step into on entering the gallery. No escape; no choice; you're in. Residual marks spot the latex; abject spray, drip & smell hits your eyes & nose. Down low one floorboard has been pulled & discarded to reveal the dusty bedding underneath. A surgical tray sits in one of two, three, four, five valleys of the underfloor. Wine or blood red, the liquid is twin-engine oil that drips from its container hung high by steel chains that network through the space creating rhizomatic connections between disparate objects, like the shower you just just stepped out of, the pink sheet cradling carbon gristle & peeing oil on the floor, & the floor-bound collection of Lilies held in Two-Stroke vases. What initially feels like a den of delicately induced despair is injected with the gush of flowers, opening your nose & eyes to other things: like the sculpted, malformed, Hans Belmer nodules of bronze that plug or grow from the ends of the chains as if to stop them from unraveling from some deep, unknown source; or the embossed text that inscribes the pink sheet like skin blisters. Lively. This is lively. There is no other word for it — Lively! Things connect & contain one another: holding, bracketing, soaking. Beyond what we can attach to this from the external social or ecological world, this is an exhibition that has no inside or outside. As Jean Luc-Nancy wrote in response to the sacrificial & lacerated body of George Bataille, the body’s orifices are not cuts, but a connective tissue of touching. Laura Ní Fhlaibhín’s art practice is a caring one. The artist touches space, interweaving a balance between rupture & repair & back again. Like Àngels Miralda writes in the accompanying text, two things have become a “singularity of vibrating matter” (or anxiety) as the missing floorboard & the plank that pokes through the gallery’s partition wall intimates a demolition or democracy to come. Whoops! That’s for another day.

—James Merrigan

Through 3o October.