The old wooden desks were sourced from the all-girls Salesian Secondary School, which happened to be right across the road from the all-boys secondary school O’Brien had attended, Ard Scoil Rís, both single-sex Catholic schools.
Beside these desks stood two minimalist figurative sculptures, on a relatively large scale that expressed the artists fascination with pondering identity beyond sex, race, nationality, profession, or otherwise, to the very existential nature of life.
Both of these sculptures wooden frames were entirely scribbled black with standard biro pens. One of the sculptures, ‘Irish’, appropriated a very old, large & beat-up looking metal sign, with the text of ‘IRISH’ covering its entire surface, hinting at the temporal nature of any external attachment or identity.
Adjacent to ‘Irish’ stood ‘You are not the body, You are not the mind’, at a taller height, brightly lit and incorporating everyday domestic and automotive materials to represent the organs.
Before ‘Amorphous’, this particular sculpture had been exhibited as a work in progress (shorter in height, not yet scribbled with black biro pen and with blank eyes; the light bulbs in the in the eye sockets not yet painted).
This was for ‘C-Inside’, a group show of Limerick based artists to show their studio practice in action. O’Brien had been in Like Studio, followed by the Franciscans Friary during that time, before moving on to Wickham Street Studios after the ‘Amorphous’ solo show.
