‘I Live in the Cracks in the Wall’ - Margaret O’Brien

Born in the UK in 1972, Margaret O’Brien studied at Limerick School of Art and Design and The Slade School of Fine Art, London.

Since completing her studies, she has staged a number of acclaimed exhibitions, including Print/Estampe at Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris; The Future Can Wait, Charlie Smith Gallery, London. Further solo exhibitions included White Picket Fencing at The Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick in 2007; No Man’s Land in the West Cork Arts Centre in 2004 and Sea of Unknowing at Pallas Heights in Dublin in 2005. She was short-listed for the AIB Art Prize by the Royal Hibernian Academy in 2003.

Drawing her inspiration from the everyday, the familiar and the domestic, O’Brien’s practice is multidisciplinary, with location fundamental to her concerns. In recreating objects or spaces that we encounter on a daily basis, she replaces their normally functional or benign fundamentals with an element of malfunction or mishap, alluding to obsessive behavioural patterns, paranoia and a compulsion to control. ‘I live in the cracks in the walls’ continues her employment of installation as a means by which the emotive experience of a space is manipulated to create a disorientating psychological environment.

Pallas

Supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and Dublin City Council, Pallas Contemporary Projects is a not-for-profit, publicly funded gallery space, which focuses on developing exchanges between Irish and international artists with a strong conceptual approach working in different media. Set up to allow artists a space to experiment and take risks with their practice, the extended period of on-site work offered exhibiting artists the opportunity to test and try out ideas ahead of their public exhibition; as a result of this approach the artists have the possibility of producing works that would not have been generated within their own production context.

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