Oisín Byrne: smell the book

31 Aug-29 Nov 2024

Overview

This summer, Mount Stuart will introduce Oisín Byrne - an Irish cross-media artist - for their first exhibition in Scotland. The starting point for Byrne’s project will be one of the less well-known collections at Mount Stuart house: its Gaelic and Irish books and pamphlets. The exhibition, running from 31st August until 20th October 2024, will include a new series of paintings - large and small scale - with a linguistic focus.

In these paintings, markings and glyphs from the archive are combined with graphology from writers from Byrne’s own library; Flann O'Brien, James Joyce, Clarice Lispector, Doris Lessing, Susan Sontag and Frank O' Hara, as interlopers to the Mount Stuart collection. This body of work furthers Byrne’s interest in creating multi-layered works combining found texts and research with fragments from his own notebooks - as if in an attempt to understand or communicate something of the complexity and non-coherence of “the self”.

The new paintings will be complemented by live performance, accompanied by a string quartet. Over the past four years, Byrne has been producing a collection of songs, which he describes as 'sardonic pop music', based on excerpts from his notebooks. Byrne has worked with Naoise Hardiman May to orchestrate his electro pop songs to acoustic strings and a series of these recordings and their accompanying video works will be dispersed throughout the house.

Writer and curator Eva Wilson sees Byrne’s songs as 'citational anthems', pulling 'formulations from conversations, borrowing them, taking them out of context, tacking them onto surfaces, quoting them back, reconsidering them, performing them.' Many of the songs have accompanying videos which embed them in the writing and theoretical ground from which they emerge. For example, his film "A PAIXĀO" - a fictional encounter with Ukranian born Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector - builds towards Byrne's choral song "Only by Deduction".

Byrne’s exhibition combines paintings, installation, live performance and film to create an immersive experience for visitors to Mount Stuart.

“Byrne’s point of departure centres around the Gaelic texts within Mount Stuart’s libraries, echoing his fascination with the written and the spoken word, and highlighting the way in which the contemporary visual arts programme continues to invigorate and respond to the collections at Mount Stuart,” explains Sophie Crichton Stuart, Chair and Director of the Contemporary Visual Arts Programme at the Mount Stuart Trust.

Byrne is glorious at finding hooks, he pulls formulations from conversations, borrowing them, taking them out of context, tacking them onto surfaces, quoting them back, reconsidering them, performing them. He has a knack for words that quicken the tongue and the ear, like ‘dilution’, ‘Alka Seltzer’, ‘gloved’, ‘ventriloquism’. In Unperform, he drags out the sentence ‘I’ll be your bad actor until the curtain falls’. This is Oisín in character, admitting himself to us, as he sings. In Byrne’s verses, I can hear the formulations of friends, of past conversations, of mock sternness syncopated into dance beat (‘I will count to three. There will not be a four’), of idioms of beauty and bureaucracy. I wonder whether I’m being quoted back to myself somewhere. His songs are citational anthems, some kind of sense arriving in the form of mixed metaphors and non sequiturs.

Extracted from 'And You, She Says, What’s the Idea of You', Eva Wilson, writer and curator, 2022

About the Artist

Oisín Byrne (b.1983, Dublin) is an Irish artist, writer and film-maker based in London. Byrne’s work has been exhibited internationally in institutions including Salzburger Kunstverein, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, Kunstinstituut Melly, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, EVA International, Paris Internationale, and Princeton University. His writing has been published in books by Pilot Press, MA Bibliotheque, Eros Press and Bookworks. He is represented by Amanda Wilkinson Gallery, London.

Artists