Current Research / Practice
The moons Phobos and Deimos (Fear and Dread) have circled Mars for millennia, tracing time through their orbit, watching the planet silently spin, their scars of impact mirrored on one another. Phobos, rotating on an ever-decreasing trajectory will eventually collide with Mars leaving Deimos to orbit alone. This momentous example of fragility, leads me to consider our own ephemerality and our understanding of time.
I am to proposing new works that are in development - under the working title Fossils and Satellites.
This research explores the possibility for discarded objects to act as contradictory vessels of degeneration or markers of atrophy and propositions for imagination through their transfiguration in material form.
The work takes abandoned footballs, a common object that is a symbol of play and conflict, that have been found in the East End of London and through processes of photography, drawing, woodcut and animation seeks to make a connection between traces of our everyday activity and a suggestion of the celestial or ethereal.
The main body of work picks up from my utilisation of woodcut printing in a previous body of work They Drifted Slowly to Eternity https://www.oranoreilly.co.uk/copy-of-seascapes-with-void that appropriated contemporary and historical images, acknowledging the cyclical nature of migration throughout history. The process engaged with time, acting as an antithesis to the speed at which imagery is digested within contemporary media.
In Fossils and Satellites, the process of woodcut is utilised in a selenographic way, tracing scars, disfigurations and impressions. The physicality of the process acting as an archive for the objects history and fragility and suggesting ideas of the microscopic and telescopic.
