Strata is a site specific artwork conceived for the Galway City Museum by the artist Joy Gerrard. The work is composed of layers and clusters of individually suspended glass balls and delicate arrangements of circular steel discs installed on the walls to balance the composition of the whole. The artist considered glass to have a subtle ability to appear made of both air or water, having the translucence of water and when suspended the ability to float like air. Strata references both sea and sky. Galway is famous for these elemental qualities that have shaped its history; ocean, weather, and the relation between both. Gerrard's work often references crowds, of both people and natural elements, and how individual elements can be drawn together into an infrastructural network. Strata could be seen as an abstract rendering of shapes that appear in both organic, geographic and constructed constellations. 

In 2008, a small publication celebrating Strata was developed along with a public launch

Joy Gerrard is a Dublin-born artist, currently based in London. Since 2003 she has completed five major public commissions in Ireland and the UK and is currently working on a significant sculptural commission for the London School of Economics, curated by the Contemporary Art Society. Crowds, and the politics of congregation have formed an ongoing thematic focus in gallery work. In imaging the crowd both figuratively and abstractly she questions the limitations of power and the transformative potential of mass gatherings and multitudes. Gerrard received funding form the Arts Council and Dublin Corporation to complete an MPhil. research project at the RCA, London in 2007 and was short-listed for the AIB Award - Ireland's most prestigious art prize - in 2008. She has recently exhibited in the Royal College of Art, London, Ubu Gallery, Glasgow in 2007, and Temple Bar Gallery in 2008.
 

The commission was managed by Angela Rolfe of the OPW