Programme
Monkey Wrench
Was the monkey wrench named after London blacksmith Charles Moncke or was it indeed invented by an industrious monkey? Either way the tools with which we work are inextricably linked with who we are. Ormston House is delighted to present Monkey Wrench, an exhibition of three Irish artists: Kevin Cosgrove, Sonia Shiel and Keef Winter.
Operating under a licensed agreement, Ormston House acknowledges the circumstances and conditions of its existence and challenges the notion that art remains a “tolerated enclosure within the global capital in which non-productive, dysfunctional and pointless experimentation can still take place”. The purpose of this initiative is not to smooth over or aestheticize the economic difficulties facing the city until further notice, but to make a genuine contribution to the city’s cultural fabric and to create new working platforms for creative practitioners.
Within distinct conceptual frameworks, the artists negotiate the stuff of work – the physicality and aesthetic potential of their materials – with stylistic variety and analytic consistency. In doing so, they re-energise the recently reopened site at 9-10 Patrick Street as a useful workspace through playful interventions of cardboard machines, ‘handyman’ constructions and finely tuned paintings of the labourer’s workshop. Ormston House encourages an open dialogue with the artworks presenting an ambivalent exhibition of the epic and the shambolic, the strange and the everyday, upholding the saying that making is thinking. After a period of extended closure, the gallery proposes itself as a nexus for discussion on the critical issues that are affecting the people and the city, supporting the contributions that artists bring to the conversation.