James Merrigan experienced Brian Teeling’s c-space installation in the toilets of The Dean Art Studios Dublin in 2022. The artist was present, as it was his job to escort visitors to the off-site space, located in the ground-floor toilets of the studio complex where Teeling had a top-floor studio. To Merrigan’s mind c-space is one of the most visceral and sympathetic off-site artworks he has experienced in recent times. It is site-specific, intimating a cruising space for casual sex, with the formal suggestions of glory holes and voyeuristic car mirrors under a heavy red light, safe and not safe. Text ranges the walls and angles of the claustrophobic toilets, reflectively present and absent, like the mirror in the mirrored self-portraits, depending on your standing or squatting position in the toilet. It’s dirty romantic. It invokes the words of the artist Luis Camnitzer, in his text work “This is a Mirror, You are a Written Sentence” (1966-68).

With the experience of Brian Teeling’s c-space in mind, we have translated that experience into the colour and paper choices of this publication. The weight of red light, a feeling of interiority, as if looking outward from the chambers of the heart is conveyed through the red inks and paper. There is also something about the photographic dark room, the analogue photographer’s gloom with a developing view, and how we become more reflective in darkness, that influenced the use of black paper and tin foil.