Custom House Studios + Gallery
Thursday 5 March – Saturday 11 April 2026
Middens are accumulations of discarded material, historical rubbish heaps. Those situated along coastlines typically contain shells, bones and other such remnants of survival. They are found in Ireland and across the world and are read as sites of temporary occupation, holding traces of movement, diets, temporary settlements and lives shaped by nomadic patterns; evidence of the practice of economic migration that persisted well into modern history. While research has largely focused on the Mesolithic period (8000 – 4000BC), the Irish coastline holds midden sites spanning from pre-farming societies to early Christian times. There are 77 recorded midden sites in Mayo, eighteen of which are sheltered in Clew Bay.
In response, A Tenuous Line, uses the form of a folding screen to represent this cradling landscape. A screen functions as a portable threshold in terms of physical protection or when employed as a verb, screening can expose and be used to selectively exclude. From one side it offers expansion; from the other, containment. A thin structure that decides what passes and what does not. The screen employs a motif associated with commercial shop grilles; a boundary that sits uneasily between categories: it is not a net for gathering, a mesh for protection, nor bars for incarceration. Its scalloped pattern evokes shells or scales, natural forms of protection grown by necessity, yet its familiar commercial use ultimately signals restriction. Shells are associated with protection but they also restrain, this contradiction, how the structures that make us feel safe can also trap us, is central to my practice.
The shells incorporated into the work were once valuable commodities, sources of nourishment and possibly of ritual or decorative significance. By placing them behind the scalloped grille, I reframe them as objects of value, drawing attention to the shifting systems through which worth is assigned and preserved. The grille exists to safeguard assets; protection hardens into denial, it is an economic barrier. This tenuous line is not a line drawn on a map. It is a line drawn around resources, around bodies, around access. Viewers are invited to engage on both a personal and universal level, encountering their own vulnerabilities and memories within the structure, questioning what it means to seek protection while remaining exposed.
