Eilís O’Connell: In the Roundness of BeingSpaceship, escape shuttle or torpedo? Visual’s main gallery has become home to an enormous, almost unearthly object. The Cork-based artistis probably best known for large public sculptures at sites across Ireland and Britain.
Even when it is commissioned commemoratively, most abstract public art requires a level of withholding. Given that it will need to survive by general consent, part of the brief is not to do anything that’s going to overly offend anyone. If it happens to be beautiful, that’s a bonus. At Visual, O’Connell takes a step into work that evokes a more wrenching response.
Michael Palin on the loss of his wife of 57 years: ‘you feel you’ll never have a friend as close as that’That was in 2017, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and before the current war in Palestine. That the intensity of destruction has been unimaginably amplified now is underlined by the exhibition of two short films by the UK-based Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum in Visual’s upstairs gallery. So Much I Want to Say shows the face of a woman, her mouth covered in various ways by male hands.