Test Tube
Ali Farrelly
Glasgow Art Weekend opening hours: Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 September 12-6pm
Regular opening hours (21 Sep - 4 Oct): Fridays and Saturdays, 12-6pm or by appointment
Horsepower is pleased to present Test Tube, a solo exhibition featuring a new kinetic sculpture and video works by Ali Farrelly.
There comes a point when trying to make something better starts to make it worse. You know you should stop, but you keep going anyway. This impulse has driven what began as a simple metal tube through an unrelenting cycle of damage and repair. But more material does not necessarily make it stronger; with every reconstruction it has become cruder and less familiar.
The question of when a work is finished has long been associated with painting. John Berger describes the moment of stopping before a finished painting as being like stopping before an animal looking back at you. Lying on the gallery floor like a wounded creature, Test Tube somehow reaches this moment of presence at an arbitrary point in an ongoing process of making and remaking.
Farrelly's relationship with objects is shaped by a desire to dissolve the distance between people and things. She plays with the possibility that objects might develop motivations and agendas of their own. Often sourced through Freecycle, these objects come to Farrelly at a point in their lives when they have stopped being useful to someone.
Studying Welding and Fabrication introduced Farrelly to another way of thinking about materials: one rooted in precision and practical problem-solving. In engineering, these skills are used to solve real-world problems, where failure has consequences. Returning to the studio, Farrelly became interested in what happens when these same materials and processes are freed from the demands of utility. A machine can do more than the task it was built to perform.
The sculpture is presented alongside videos filmed from the perspective of both Farrelly and the sculpture itself. Together, they reveal a mutual encounter between artist and object, where maker and material witness one another.
Test Tube opens on Friday 18 September, joining other East End spaces opening that evening as part of Glasgow Art Weekend.