11th February—10th March 2025
Loading Bay is a webpage for writing by artists, an online dock – a space of exchange. Curated by Frank Wasser, the commissions collectively convey the materiality of language by teasing out a deft register of content and forms.
The title of this project positions an online analogue of the National Sculpture Factory’s loading bay. Loading bays are commonly encountered in factories, commercial units and industrial structures. Functioning as integral parts of a facility, they serve the purpose of providing entry points to staging areas, sites of production, storage rooms, and in this instance, art works.
These commissions offer artists the space to consider and act upon the implications of writing as a sculptural form. The inaugural commissioned artists are Joseph Noonan-Ganley, Francis Whorrall-Campbell, Oisín Byrne, Kelly Lloyd and Frank Wasser.
Loading Bay launch exhibition will run onsite at the National Sculpture Factory from June 23rd – June 24th 2023. Opening reception: June 23rd 18:00, followed by live performances, launch party and drinks reception at 21:00
You can view/download the commissions by clicking on the buttons below:
UBIOB is an extract of Noonan-Ganley’s 2023 video installation Our Bed, designed to allow viewers to move through a series of jockstrap letters.
Our Bed uncovers emergency beds made by Uruguayan rugby players stranded following a plane crash in the sub-zero Andes in 1972. The video explores the beds’ cultural production as they appear in Hollywood cinema, mass distributed publications, academic archives, marginalia produced by individual readers and a jockstrap alphabet.
The slogan in UBIOB was fashioned by a reader of the 1974 book Alive, which was written through interviews with the players. This reader elaborated upon the methods that the rugby-player survivors improvised to make clothes, beds and messages with salvaged materials. The resulting slogan and jockstrap alphabet expresses the rugby-players’ sensual, elastic, collective and sexual experiences.
What Gives is a digital download consisting of editable folders of text and image. Once expanded, the ZIP file presents a series of nested folders that the reader (you) are invited to navigate through. Starting with a view through the double doors of Marcel Duchamp’s sculpture Etant donnés, language becomes the setting for your transformation from voyeur to the nude subject of the onlooker’s gaze.
A PAIXĀO is a text work and short film describing an imagined encounter – through reading – with the Ukrainian born Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector. Byrne’s original text is presented online alongside one of his song works, Only by Deduction. Byrne’s film will be screened onsite at NSF.
Lloyd has interviewed people in the arts about their livelihoods since 2017. In /saıt/ Lloyd joins excerpts from these interview transcripts to explore /saıt/, how we frame the work of others when speaking about it, and how a single voice can collapse, unite, and disembody.
In Factotum is a multi-faceted ongoing text work and performance by Frank Wasser. The work’s fulcrum is a website designed by the artist which registers 1000 distractions recorded by the artist while trying to complete a practice-based PhD and balance waged labour, including teaching and writing. The selected distractions are organised into loose categories embedded within the website which scrutinise the various forms and institutions the artist works within and without, taking the history of lecturing, factories and the history of the building of the National Sculpture Factory (formally Cork Tram depot) as it’s starting points.