Aoife Desmond

b. 1974, Ireland

My working methodology is performative and interdisciplinary. I combine film-making, photography, drawing, performance, installation, sculpture and collaboration in constantly shifting variations. Using Super 8 film, an Olympus stills camera and a notebook, I physically map a series of drift walks. An aesthetic journey emerges through the act of walking, images rising to the surface like poetic markers. Linking to the work of the Situationists International, these ‘drift’ or dérive walks seek to remap divergent landscapes. My work practice questions human relationships to place and nature, particularly urban wastelands and areas of neglect. By exploring wasteland, relationships between production and entropy are exposed. I choose to create intimate one-off events and interventions that reference locality, history and daily life.

Atlas Avenue is situated off the Dock Road, beside Limerick harbour. Its surprisingly poetic name sits in contrast to its mismatched collection of vacant and active spaces. The French term for wasteland, terrain vague, seems apt. This project features a series of photographs screen-printed onto the windows of the glass corridor in Limerick’s City Hall. This glass corridor functions as a kind of interior street. The window images portray the ruined and worker areas of Atlas Avenue, functioning as a reverse of the official front of the city.

(Text: e v+ a – matters catalogue, 2010)