Closing Event: A Camel Is A Horse Designed By A Committee

6 pm, Sat 25th March 2023, Free Admission, All welcome

The exhibition will continue to Sat, April 1st.

The Courthouse Gallery & Studios, Ennistymon invites you to the closing event of A Camel Is A Horse Designed By A Committee by the Glue Factory Artist Collective. The closing event marks the culmination of seven weeks of artists installing the exhibition one after another taking the lead from the previous artists re-invention of the space, influenced by audience engagement and a week-long residency in the space.

The notion for this experiment in how we present and develop exhibitions is based on the parlour game ‘Consequences’, where a collection of words or images is collectively assembled by a group in sequence, each participant responding to the end of the previous player’s contribution. In this exhibition, each of the seven members of The Glue Factory occupied The Courthouse Gallery for one week. In that time, they created and assembled new work using the gallery as a project space, and responded to the work left by the person before them. They were free to rearrange, edit, flip, and hijack as they please the previous artists’ work, though notes, hints and photographs of previous installs were left by their predecessors expressing how they wish their work to be changed or left unchanged and sharing previous configurations.

The Glue Factory:

The Glue Factory is a collective of seven emerging Irish artists: Husk Bennett, Michelle Malone, Tadhg O’Cuirrin, Gearoid O’Dea, Elinor O’Donovan, Jack Rogers, and Aoife Ward. Hailing from all four corners of Ireland, and covering a broad range of media including performance, sculpture, painting, drawing and installation, The Glue Factory is an experiment in and testament to collaboration, communication and friendship.

The Glue Factory was founded in 2021, mid-lockdown, where the members came together as an Instagram group chat. Responding to a mutual need for peer-support, The Glue Factory began to host online group crits, where they could feedback on and learn from each other’s practices. Early attempts at collaboration led to the adoption of The Glue Factory’s mantra, ‘a camel is a horse designed by a committee’, a quote by the designer of the Mini, Sir Alec Issigonis, which reflects the difficulties of group work.

The collective’s name is a morbid tongue-in-cheek reference to the place to which dead horses are sent.

Below are some images of the different configurations so far: