All at Once Collapsing Together, solo exhibition, 2025
“Using multi-screen film, photography, text and neon sculptures, shifting personifications of nature voice Gaffney’s concerns about the balance of influence between humans and the environment.
The collection feels like a singular piece of art comprised of interrelated aspects realised through different media. Each piece feeds into the whole: revealing, commenting on and, at times, contradicting the sub-text of the surrounding works.
The centrepiece is a two-screen film sharing its title with the exhibition. Two female presenting performers, costumed in sack-like brown dresses or skin-coloured body socks, move through bog scrub, heather, grass and stone while voicing characters that shift from a passing cloud to food caught in a carnivorous plant to the Earth itself. These twisting perspectives reflect on our teetering balance of reliance, sustenance, sensuality and destruction with the planet.”
– Craig Cox, West Cork People.
“There is a muted psychedelia to the film, identities shifting quietly through a palette brown, green, heather purple and the blue/grey of bodies of water. This spreads through the rest of the exhibition, its rhizome-like character manifests in the fact that other works take their title from the film’s text.
This is apparent in a beautifully subtle way, as the film is audible throughout the gallery. At serendipitous moments, the title of a photograph or neon sculpture will sound while being viewed. This intertwines and occasionally illuminates the work under consideration. For example, in one corner the words “a missing sound” are written in blue neon. As I was considering the phrase, it echoed from a section of the film reflecting on the discovery of a poisoned white-tailed eagle somewhere in rural Ireland.
The revelatory effect of Gaffney’s titling recurs through the exhibition. One photograph, of a performer curled at the foot of a sand dune, seemed at first a quick metaphor for human effect but its title (‘And You Leave The Rest Of Yourself Behind’) opened the work into a consideration of bodily disintegration, of how we are both of the Earth and an impression left upon it.”
– Craig Cox, West Cork People.
“There is a hallucinatory quality to much of the work. In the text/photographic piece ‘Pentaptych (A concentration of time)’ the ingestion of psilocybin, or magic mushrooms, is directly spoken about, leading to an observation of fractal patterns in clouds and the geometric movement of bees. The work effectively realises the perceptual dilation of a hallucinogenic experience but Gaffney adds depth by reflecting on the tendency to use nature as a vehicle for traumatic healing without considering the trauma that use might inflict.”
– Craig Cox, West Cork People.
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