MARY-JO GILLIGAN

Fathom and Span

*Delivered via mp3 players, duration 22 - 24 minutes. 

"...Fathom and Span is a solo exhibition that crosses boundaries with theatrical experience – not as audience but in the role of players. Gilligan’s exhibition deals with the curatorial intention of the project: to consider the gallery’s withdrawal from its own architecture in anticipation of the institution’s move across the city. This very architecture is exploited in the work as a way to investigate how things and people are a unit of something else. The pre-constructed space is the subject, whilst scripted functions and roles bleed into the fabric of the room." - Emer Lynch, curator. 

Fathom and Span is a score of gestures inviting the audience to engage with the architecture of the  gallery. As Broadcast Gallery faced decommissioning this final exhibition offered the audience the room's bare form and 

matter as material to explore.  A physical measuring and sensual mapping of the room unfolded over time as the audience attentively collaborated in considered actions and quiet reflection.  Apparent emptiness bloomed into vivid presence as the score elicited a mutual resonance of body and building. Palms were dragged down glass as the substance's stability was pondered; ankles followed the heat of copper pipes before drinking water from a copper jug; lino was peeled and windows opened. A vocabulary of feet, paces, yards, fingers, inches, spans, cubits, palms, hands and fathoms drew the audience into physical  relation with the space the body inhabits and embedded a sense of comprehension. 

The piece could be experienced solo or with a maximum of three participants in total. The modulated score was offered in a different variation to each person at any one time resulting in an ever changing dynamic of chance timings, overlapping paths, unique gaits and echoed gestures.

*Special thanks to Vaida Varnagiene and Thomas Tully for their roles as audience assistants.