Oisín Byrne: smell the book
The starting point for the exhibition is one of the archive’s less well-known collections: its Gaelic and Irish books and pamphlets. Running until 20th October 2024, smell the book includes a new series of paintings combining markings and glyphs from the archive with graphology from writers in 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.
The paintings are complemented by installations of song and film. Over the past four years, Byrne has been producing a collection of songs, which he describes as 'verbose pop music', based on excerpts from his own notebooks. Byrne and musician Naoise Hardiman May have collaborated on the orchestration of these electropop songs to acoustic strings which, with accompanying video, are displayed around the house.
