26th Nov 2024—26th Nov 2025
The National Sculpture Factory (NSF) is delighted to announce the launch of Factory Fragments. A New Ceramic Commission by Simon Kidd
A limited series of newly commissioned ceramic artworks by Irish artist Simon Kidd. Kidd’s work reimagines the NSF’s industrial past through a contemporary lens. He has meticulously crafted each piece using casts of architectural features and particularised structures found exclusively on the NSF Factory floor. These new objects, born from industrial remnants and created using materials, sourced from Oileán Chléire, challenge notions of authenticity and the relationship between an original and a copy.
This collection is a series of fifteen ceramics; five forms taken from features on the Factory floor, and three different styles of glazing. Each piece is unique and available to buy for a limited time only.
Factory Fragments was commissioned to play between the gap of the physical and digital exhibitions. The collection will be showcased in an online exhibition, accessible through a newly developed online portal – . This innovative approach allows the NSF to showcase the extraordinary site located work created by Simon Kidd but also allows the Factory Fragments collection to be purchased online, offering a unique opportunity to acquire a piece of work that inculcates the constant creative history of the Factory floor.
This series of work by Simon is a philosophical inquiry which invites viewers to ponder the nature of representation and the relationship between the original and the copy. By casting and reimagining elements of the Factory, the artist challenges our perceptions of authenticity and value. Why cast a ceramic brick when it is already a cast itself? What does he mean when he detaches a piece of the Factory and takes it out of context? Can an object be imbued with the spirit of its surroundings?
Simon Kidd is a renowned Irish artist whose work explores the boundaries between sculpture, installation, and even performance. Simon uses a variety of ceramic processes to create sculptural ceramic forms that become meditations on place. He often incorporates site-specific materials – such as granite, basalt, limestone, wood ashes, and turf ash – gathered from around the island of Ireland and used as inclusions. He is currently living in Oileán Chléire, an offshore island gaeltacht, Where he is making through live land-casting and firing pieces in a custom hand-built hybrid kiln while incorporating the use of materials collected from the island.
Objects, sculptures, vessels, artefacts, pots. They always begin with a place, with its stories and feelings it evokes.
These pieces respond directly and indirectly to a place, they are embedded and coated with materials gathered from there. The forms informed by what is found there, or what once was there. I want these pieces to become artefacts of their place – to be physical connections to the land they’re born out of. I work with ceramics, utilising the variety of processes that can be used: throwing, slip casting, press moulding, hand-building. I allow each project I work on to inform the processes used. What is a constant thread throughout my work is the use of local materials, which are used as inclusions in the clay body or else as glazes – granite, basalt, limestone, wood ashes, turf ash. There are endless possibilities for what can be used and how it can be used, and the constant experimentation and learning that this creates is an important part of my practice.
– Simon Kidd