Isobel O’Donovan

I, as a graduating student at the Glasgow School of Art, would like to state my support for the Pause or Pay Campaign. To read the full manifesto https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MwdvZfLTp1udaASJ1EAmRT9XR-OPQIyU/view.

My practice attempts to be a space where absence can be contained and examined. This often feels like I am trying to describe a body that is just out of sight. To do this I try to highlight connections between ephemeral by-products of embodiment such as breath, dreams, memories and language. Resultant works contain absence at their core – taking the form of, for example, an empty bed or a departing butterfly. I hope that this agitation between what is physically present and what is suggested to have just departed the scene allows viewers to consider their own embodiment and experience of time in their own lives. I work across multiple media – sculpture, video, drawing, family archival material, and writing – often incorporating several media into one work. Absence, coupled with this multiplicity of forms attempts to describe how dreams, memory, and embodiment are sprawling and intangible – always just out of reach of language. In absenting a fixed body from these investigations I hope to make space for whatever ghosts the viewer may bring to the work.

In my video Who is that hiding under my breath? I present a rubbing of my great-grandmother’s bed hung from my mother’s bedroom window. As the drawing breathes, butterflies come and go from the frame. The work attempts to consolidate what about the lives of four generations of women is shared – having been born, having slept, having dreamt, having drawn breath. Sleep is presented as a space for co-existence, where linear time collapses and lives which are separated by mortal boundaries can transect. The butterfly, whose life is lived in different bodies, hints at the possibility that a common embodied experience could drift between vessels – such as bodies, furniture, or dreams.