Kate Strain
Diagonal Acts is a multi-platform project by Irish artist Marie Farrington. The exhibition here at The Dock brings together sculptural and site-responsive artwork by the artist, alongside specially commissioned works by invited collaborators. Underpinning the project is Marie’s longstanding interest in gaps, fragments and edges, in processes of archaeology and geology, in ideas around memory and place, and in the connection between the human body and the land.
Once upon a time, when Marie was a child growing up in rural Kildare, a piece of land on her family farm was subject to a compulsory purchase order, making way for a new motorway. The site underwent an archaeological dig by order of the local authority. Marie has vivid memories of seeing patches of squared off grass being turned inside out. Walking over the fields to visit the archaeologists at work, young Marie was astonished as objects and artefacts buried in the earth were brought to the surface with care and precision. The excavation mostly yielded flakes of flint and other inconsequential things, but to Marie it seemed as if the secrets of the past were being revealed in front of her eyes. She began to understand history not as something in the distant temporal past, but as something that still exists in the present, that is located directly beneath us.
Throughout Marie’s research as an artist, she has looked closely into the fields of geology and archaeology. During her residency at Trinity Centre for the Environment (2021–22), her research repurposed and inverted geological sampling methods as modes of making in the studio. Fascinated by layering, and the unstoppable force of time as a process of constant accumulation, her works became portals into other practices, through material intervention. In researching archaeological methods, Marie learned that there are no such things as dedicated archaeological tools.
Archaeologists simply borrow tools from other disciplines. Shovels from DIY stores, trowels from garden centres, forks from cutlery trays, brushes from artists’ studios. In a similar way, Marie gleans knowledge from other disciplines, bringing processing techniques to bear on her own sculptural practice.
Marie has come to think of the artworks she produces as sitting on a coordinate plane, a basic graph that consists of a horizontal X axis and a vertical Y axis where data (or ideas) can be represented (or imagined). For Marie, the X axis signifies a horizontal movement across; a relational way of being. Relative to the X axis, the Y axis maps a vertical movement. Verticality could be thought of as an historical way of thinking – an opportunity to move downward, into or through – an archaeological excavation of the past, perhaps. Positioning a point Z on the grid allows us to represent time as well as space, by giving an action or an artefact a relative temporal location, reachable via a diagonal line. The title of this project refers to diagonal lines as ways to connect, divide, and move across various planes/disciplines/ places/ideas, through materials as well as through thoughts.
For this exhibition, Marie has invited contributions from other fields. Archaeological illustrator Róisín O Meadhra produced drawings of some of Marie’s artworks.Writer Megan Macedo wrote a text responding to the work Figures for Lifting. Graphic designer Alex Synge created a website for the project – www.diagonalacts.com – the site acts as a digital repository of text and image-based material, hosting preparatory drawings and background information. Marie also commissioned artists to make sculptures inspired by excavation tools. For the collection, Marie created a steel sieve for sifting soil (ACTS (catch/sift), 2025) and a spade made from soil (ACTS (scrape/dig), 2025). Liliane Puthod made a sculptural wheelbarrow for transporting soil samples (Barrow, 2025), and Laura Ní Fhlaibhín created a blanket using earthworm poo for nourishing the soil (blanket for earthworms, 2025).
These objects will be activated as part of a day of close engagement with the exhibition. Visitors are welcome to join us on Saturday 18 October as we sit with the work, read together, activate gestures implied by the sculptural forms and talk about the ideas grounding it all.