All at Once Collapsing Together, solo exhibition, 2024
Spanning across film, photography and writing, All at Once Collapsing Together uses fiction to imagine new ways of relating to the natural world. Images throughout the exhibition act as mirrors to the healing and relief the environment can offer, with narratives fraught with climate anxiety interrupting and reframing these as temporary and fragile.
“Gaffney’s newest exhibition, at the Butler Gallery, feels like the product of a long gestation. All at Once Collapsing Together features photography, text and, of course, an immersive two-screen exhibition film. The combination of these diverse elements is coherent and synchronous, albeit that purposeful cross-currents are at work within the exhibition as a whole.
The show conjures a fictional world of verdant landscapes that in some scenes pass over into wildernesses suffused with an otherworldly, sublime quality: early German romanticist landscape painters, such as Georg Friedrich Kersting, seem woven into the DNA of Gaffney’s tableaux of forests and caves. Two figures, played by Sian Ní Mhuirí and Helen O’Dea, wander through this realm.
The performers Gaffney chooses to collaborate with are instrumental to their projects’ success: Ní Mhuirí and O’Dea are pitch-perfect, appearing natural and at ease whatever the demands of the script. Ní Mhuirí delivers the plaintive monologue, a spoken form between elliptical storytelling and poetry, and the music of her voice permeates the exhibition, carrying and condensing the atmosphere of that other world into our own.
The nature of the pair’s relationship is unclear, although it seems that Ní Mhuirí has coaxed O’Dea into life, equal parts mother and midwife, by ushering her into coherence from a surreal uterine bath draped in red latex. As they explore their surroundings, Gaffney constructs a visual rhapsody that alludes to environmentalism, Irish mythology and intergenerational care.”
– Tom Lordan, A visual rhapsody from an outstanding Irish artist; 5 star review in the Irish Times, June 2025
A Butler Gallery National Tour. This project was funded and supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Cavan Arts Office, Arts Council of Northern Ireland (through the National Lottery), and developed through research grants from Platform 31 and University of Atypical.
Installation images by Ros Kavanagh