Skerries Art Trail: Marie Farrington -Swim in the landscape, walk on the sea
Artist Marie Farrington
Title Swim in the landscape, walk on the sea
Materials Stainless steel combined with sand from Skerries South Beach suspended in resin sections
Dimensions Approx. 5cm x 1,200cm (12m)
Location Installed onto a curved wall under the Martello Tower in Skerries, along the footpath from Red Island Carpark down towards the seafront
[Artist’s Production Partner: Space Forms]
Marie Farrington’s artwork takes the familiar shape of the handrail and is made using sand collected from the nearby Skerries South Beach, which is suspended in resin and combined with segments of handcrafted stainless steel.
Artist’s comment: “The project title – Swim in the landscape, walk on the sea – is cast into the artwork in Braille, a tactile writing system of raised dots used by people who are visually impaired. These segments encourage passers-by to touch the artwork and were made using sand from Skerries' South Beach”
The translation of the artwork title into Braille was developed in collaboration with staff at the National Council for the Blind of Ireland (NCBI).
Marie’s project explores how we record ourselves in the landscape and also how the landscape records us.
Marie Farrington
Marie Farrington’s practice draws gentle attention to the elusive, the momentary and the residual. Her installations can be read as ephemeral testing grounds, material glossaries or nebulous collections of forms and substances that excavate and uncover the subtle forces and entropies contained in materials. In mapping the affinities between delicately-bound histories, spaces or hierarchies, Marie’s works activate tenuous exchanges between landscape, language, myth and intimacy, offering fragile encounters with the invisible lives of sites, the volatility of memory and the slippery agencies of the places in which we spend time.
Marie has held recent exhibitions at VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow (2021); Leitrim Sculpture Centre (2021); Irish Museum of Modern Art (2019); Highlanes Gallery (2019); Pallas Projects/Studios (solo, 2019).
Recent awards include Arts Council Project Award (2021); Platform 31 Bursary Award (2021); Visual Arts Bursary Award (2020; 2017); Arts Council Travel and Training Award (2018).
Recent residencies include Centre for the Environment, Trinity College Dublin (2021); Fire Station Artists’ Studios (2018-2023), ‘Landscape, Ecology and Environment,’ Leitrim Sculpture Centre, (2020-21); Graphic Studios Residency, funded by Dublin City Council (2020-21); Rapid Residency, Science Gallery Dublin, funded by the Provost’s Academic Development Fund, Trinity College Dublin (2020); Resort Residency, Fingal (2018); SÍM Residency, Reykjavik, Iceland (2018). Her work is held in the collections of the Arts Council and the OPW.