David Lilburn
b. 1950, Ireland
I pass the site most days, the squat concrete and steel core of an unrealised, grandiose shopping mall on a hill in the north-east of Limerick, just outside the city boundary. Rising from the site are seven monumental cranes, their booms free to slew with the prevailing wind – a crew of giant, idiosyncratic weather vanes. Stark, remote and in most weathers quite beautiful, the ‘monument’ at times evokes in me images of the human consequences of capitalist excess – the Lockout in Dublin 1913, Grosz’s Berlin in the Weimar Republic, the Great Depression in the ‘thirties – and also images of social breakdown nearer to home, here, now.
(Text: e v+ a – matters catalogue, 2010)
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