Isabel Nolan
This text was written in response to Marie Farrington's exhibition Glossaries for Forwardness, which took place at the Museum Building, Trinity College Dublin from 27 April – 23 September 2023, curated by Rachel Botha.
It seemed reasonable to be unaware of olivine; but less so when I learn it is the most abundant mineral in the Earth’s upper mantle. And though I’d heard of anthracite, carborundum and bio-resin, my ignorance of what specifically are these substances did not feel consequential. Realizing that I don’t know how ink, glass or wax are made is however strangely unsettling.
They each have myriad ways of being present to, used, or treated by humans. Formed, melted, arrayed or however acted upon by an artist, it is apparent that they are all substances with palpable, extensive histories. Collectively these substances feel old. All are or were a long time in production, if production is the right word to describe the profoundly ancient, gradual and often slow processes, natural and cultural, which make such materials available to us today. Marie Farrington discovers a range of beautiful ways to work them. To put it fundamentally – marking, transforming or occupying space with new meaning and, perhaps most resonantly, invoking passing time.
The location, and in many regards the subject, of the exhibition ‘Glossaries of Forwardness’, The Museum Building in Trinity College Dublin demands and deserves a certain respect. The home, since it was constructed in the 1850s, of ‘natural and experimental science’ and latterly, the geology department, the impressive edifice of the Palazzo-style building features an array of dazzling decorative elements, including a mesmerising string course comprised of unique plants and flowers hand-carved in Portland Stone. Imposing columns and Romanesque arches dominate the vestibule of the building. Display boards inform the visitor that a wide variety of marbles and other stone were used, fittingly, in the building of this temple, so to speak, of geology.
‘A Glossary for Forwardness’ published to accompany the exhibition directs us to Farrington’s pointed focus on the physicality and continuity of time. The past “and all the coming accumulation” shores up our sense of the future’s incipience. Time, it is stated, “favours forwardness.” The press release explains that the “exhibition is a call for forwardness, a linear push across one state of being and into another…” The past brings our attention to the present: downwards, outwards and forever onwards.
The vocabulary of processes delineated by Farrington, or indeed by the works, became, not a lexicon of cool, or technical descriptors, but a physical paean to deep time, motion, and the material culture of long-past and long-drawn-out geological events. Every action, from measuring, heating, draping, grinding, marking, glazing, casting, suspending, etching to staining, twisting, stacking, pairing, printing, and displaying, felt in Farrington’s hands attentive, deliberate, bordering on devotional. With every considered intervention – playful or methodical – the triangulation of building, material and process is seamless. Via the language of geology and climatic change, the exhibition as a whole speaks to the Earth.
Forward, of course, can also mean pert, the word flags not just position or movement but also presumption. Disavowing that forwardness in this sense has negative connotations, allowing only that being forward is daring, a deliberate strategy of deploying familiarity or rather intimacy in the face of grandeur, makes a sensual sense of the range of aesthetic interventions in The Museum Building.
To the uninitiated, the vocabulary of the works and the building might seem technical, but they are clearly simpatico. In dialogue they share an appreciation of natural and artificial processes, they celebrate the substances that are unfamiliar and those that are wholly domesticated, the exquisite and geologically commonplace. The works, nudge, sidle up to, and bed themselves in the building’s sills, vents, walls, flooring, and display cases; they echo and delight in the columns, steps, arches and staircase that cut and shape the Museum Building’s ‘reservoirs of air’. In turn the architecture cradles, holds and prizes the formal elegance of the artworks. It is a beautifully mutual pairing.
In the time since The Museum Building was built, we have comprehensively learnt, if not absorbed or acted upon the lesson, that we are not the proprietors of the world. The Earth cannot promise us a future made entirely in our own image, a world forever at our service. As the foyer slowly divulged the exhibited works, directed by Farrington’s attentive, affectionate gaze, we see that it is in part the work done daily in The Museum Building that will shape and afford us a more reciprocal, informed relationship with our world.
The outcome of a research process, ‘Glossaries of Forwardness’ at first glance looked a lot like an exhibition, but ultimately I see it as a prolonged love letter to The Museum Building. Testing the capacity of human imagination to not see the world as our stage, it gave homage to the remarkable matter of our planet, to thinking in eons. The exhibition, led by Farrington’s fascination with the discipline of geology, her desire to see where materials take one, is not mere evidence of research diligently done. Rather the works emerge, as tactile, thoughtful, slow and peculiar tributes to connection: to reciprocal, deep and porous relationships.