What happens when art leaves the gallery and escapes to the streets? In Unconformities, artist and writer Bridget O’Gorman aims to get to the heart of this question. Through a series of five temporary, text-based interventions, Bridget invites audiences to encounter Clonmel from a different perspective. Installed on overlooked gates and thresholds throughout the town, the works are specifically designed to be stumbled upon as part of our everyday landscape.
“The work speaks to overlooked parts of Clonmel that we habitually pass by, largely unnoticed in our daily lives,” Bridget explains. “The idea appealed to me because it allows for an opportunity to create work one might happen upon – and perhaps engage people who might not necessarily attend a traditional art exhibition.”
For Unconformities, Bridget drew upon the history of the town, developing a body of work that references Clonmel’s place-name (Clonmel meaning “meadow of honey”) – with the “physical, connective and healing properties of honey” to the forefront of her mind.
The resulting works take the form of texts describing sculptural objects, materials and environments which were never made. Rather than presenting a physical object, each intervention exists as “a conjured presence” – something imagined into existence through language and its relationship with the place where it appears.
The works have been developed in collaboration with independent socially engaged design studio Take Courage, founded by Irish artist Conor Foran and Bart Rzeznik. Using a weatherproof vinyl decal normally associated with commercial signage, the interventions are deliberately temporary and will be removed at the end of Ireland’s 2026 Presidency of the European Union.
Installed in both honeyed gold and copper, the texts respond to their environment, reflections changing based on the angle from which they are viewed. From the door of the old military Barracks to a metal gate at the original Bulmers site on Dowd’s Lane, the works engage with parts of the town which may otherwise go unnoticed, passed by without a second glance.
For Bridget, the project is also an opportunity to consider connection – between people, places and the histories held within them. One of the works reads:
and all of that which flows and seeps is what really connects us
“We are all connected – if we allow ourselves to see that,” she says.
Unconformities invites audiences to do exactly that: to slow down, look again, and discover something unexpected within the familiar streets of Clonmel.
