Preserving Hole
05.09.24 - 12.10.24
Aled Simons Bláithín Mac Donnell Tom Cardew
Division of Labour, Salford
Preserving Hole is an exhibition of audio, sculpture and textiles.
A meteorite, a spoil tip, a mountain or an island. A fatberg. A co-authored story entangling fact, fiction and anecdotal prose. Three voices become one narrator, Celtic myth, folklore and superstition are merged, layered and retold. A hole or a bog, subterranean preservation - like a time capsule in a biscuit tin with a dodgy lid, buried 40 years ago but the water got in. What happens when fact becomes anecdote?
‘There had been heavy rain, a week of torrential downpours, incessant waterfall, fields of crops washed away overnight. Usually after heavy rain they clear the drains of organic waste, leaves, trees, silt and mud. But this time, this time they found a coffin.’
This exhibition is the culmination of a conversational collaboration between Welsh artists Tom Cardew, Aled Simons and Irish artist Bláithín Mac Donnell. Emerging from research sharing and an exploration of practice intersections; individual interests are fused in tangential storytelling, narrative building and myth making. Unearthing spurious information and hearsay to present loose-narrative audio and sculptural installation, drawing on collective Celtic nation backgrounds and reflections on the existential urge to remain, to persevere and to preserve. This project follows the development of a new collaborative practice made possible by the Four Nations Fund.
Artist biographies:
Bláithín Mac Donnell is an Irish artist who explores how we share and retell stories through performance, text, collage and sound. Concerned with the entanglement between rural and digital infrastructures, her work seeks to attend to a sense of place by meshing the past, present and future. Currently a PhD researcher at NCAD, Dublin her practice based research explores the dissemination of the performed voice. Bláithín holds an MA from the Royal College of Art, 2015 and a BA from Goldsmiths, London, 2012.
Tom Cardew is a Welsh artist and writer. His practice explores tacit societal structures of competitive and comparative worth, meditating upon the markers, myths, superstitions and materials that shape them. His work often examines ideas of authenticity and memory within the digital; atmospheres and social scaffolds formed through transactional, value-based exchange, and of digital, para-social relations. He was Fluxus Arts Projects Laureate at Frac Bretagne and Domaine de Kerguéhennec and had a solo exhibition at Oriel Davies in 2024. He is currently working on a series of permanent public sculptures supported by Studio Response (2025).
Aled Simons studied, lives and works in Swansea, South Wales. The core of Simons’ practice explores pseudo-science, sham-ritual, anecdote, class and humour; found objects, crude sculpture, video, performance and writing. He often employs looping or repetition - the ubiquitous gif or meme format. Early 1990s television and its specific place at the junction of a shift between analogue broadcast and digital on-demand viewing. Inverted values - re-interpreting or misunderstanding the idea of an heirloom. Operating in the space between the tension release of a laugh and the awkwardness of things that go on too long or fall flat and fail. Recent exhibitions include: Poor Things, Fruitmarket Edinburgh, Killing TV, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, Unchorus, Freelands Foundation, London and Soft Split the Stone, g39, Cardiff.