Newbridge House, Donabate
4 June – 19 September 2021
Ella de Burca, Eithne Jordan, Barbara Knežević, Niamh McCann, Helen O’Leary, Niamh O’Malley, Liliane Puthod, Alice Rekab with Louise Meade, Katie Watchorn, Emma Wolf-Haugh
Curated by Marysia Więckiewicz-Carroll
The Newbridge House collection, now a selection of objects frozen in time, was once contemporary, evolving and growing. Amassed in the eighteenth century by Thomas Cobbe and his wife Elizabeth – the main force behind the collection, it reflected their personal tastes and responded to the fashion and trends of the era. Their collecting practice survives as a memento, a repository of past experiences, fuelling our curiosity through its singular representation of a period in history. It is a place of study, research and conservation.
New considerations of familiar settings reimagines Newbridge House as a site of current thought and sensibility, expanding the collection and acknowledging contemporary art practices and discourses. By juxtaposing old and new, weaving contemporary art with the existing artefacts, this exhibition looks at what prompts and informs the forming of a collection at different points in history, conjuring up a vision of what Lady Betty’s collection might have looked like today.
In recognition of Lady Betty’s significant activities as a collector, the exhibition brings together ten women and gender-minority artists whose practices explore complex personal, historical and political narratives through sculpture, painting, film and installation. From colonial legacies, to a critique of consumerism and a queer-feminist questioning of what is missing from the canons, the selected works address topics that feel particularly pertinent in the historical setting of Newbridge House. They open up a conversation across centuries, showing how cultural and societal shifts transform our conversations, while also demonstrating the power that artworks have to interrogate and respond to a rapidly changing world.
Photo: Louis Haugh