Fill

Imbued with a haunting sense of melancholy and loss, Fill traces the presence of a profound absence, preserving the memory of time and life passed by. A ghostly silver landscape forms from the hollow negative potholes, cracks, fissures, splits and tears of the previous street from the Old Ballymun. 

These pavement wounds, cast in a silvery metal make up a strangely decorative pattern, almost organic and floral in parts, emerging from the behaviour of the liquid metal. The residual texture of constant traffic, the rough passage scars left behind from the now re-surfaced street. The ordinary roadside, a piece of common property with its small histories scored in secret code, by movement, life and weather, has been filled and cast in solid wax, then re-cast to aluminium metal and re-placed back into the ground.

An un-monumental monument, emphasising the insignificant marks of the lived in space, re-asserting our relationship between place and time, past and present. Fill is a memorial to the overlooked. It carries within, something elusive, so seemingly meaningless of a before, into the "new" Ballymun. It resists a levelling of memory, suggesting that places need to keep their scars in order to preserve what our finite human memory will soon forget.

The work was reviewd in The Irish Times, Magill Magazine and www.recirca.com 

Catherine Delaney was born in Dublin in 1965 and graduated from the National College of Art and Design in 1984. She continued her study in sculpture at the Johnson Atelier in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. She obtained a scholarship to continue and further her study in the Akademie Der Bildenden Kunste, Munich in Germany in 1986 for another two years in the field of sculpture and photography.

She had her first solo exhibition in the Project Arts Centre in 1994 entitled Rib By Rib. She was selected for EAST International in 1996 in the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich in the UK, by selectors Richard Long and Roger Ackling for her large off-site installation of The Bridge which was installed in a disused Watermill in County Kilkenny.

She was elected to membership of Aosdana in 2008. Her work is represented in numerous public and private collections in Ireland, the UK and the United States.