The Problem With Stability

Pallas Contemporary Projects is something of a hidden gem in Dublin's artistic landscape, secreted away from the larger tourist haunts and commercial entities that populate the city centre. Which isn't to say that it's inaccessible, in fact in the fish bowl of Dublin city, it's just past the little plastic diver, tucked away between Stoneybatter and Smithfield. If you're willing to go slightly off road with your city centre strolling, take a lookey-loo in this month, where Australian artists Pat Foster and Jen Berean have opened a new exhibition to coincide with their international studio residency.

Already well established in their native Melbourne, Foster and Berean employ the vocabulary of architectural design to appraise how we understand and utilize our built environs. In preparing their residency show, The Problem with Stability, their process has been ideally positioned between Stoneybatter's PCP and the IFSC-based Fire Station Studios, allowing them to experience a cross section of the city, and the seismic-shifts that recent trends of boom and bust have wreaked. In the midst of all this to-ing and fro-ing, we caught up with the pair to suss out what they had in store for us...

What can we expect from your new show?

We have produced all new works for the Pallas show over the past month whilst we have been in residence at the Fire Station studios. The show will consist of a sculpture and wall-based works that are an abstracted response to images and texts relating to how social spaces are designed and controlled.

Has the new experience of Dublin had a significant effect on what you're producing?

Typically our work is a response to both the physical and social structures of a given environment, so as soon as we landed in Dublin we quickly started researching the city, through walking around, talking to locals and digging through images. Attempting to get a grasp on the workings of the city and also its significant history. We were lucky enough to be taken on a fantastically insightful tour by a local historian that really helped us to start to understand the layers of history that inform Dublin. So yes, the city has certainly affected the work we have produced.

Is it fair to say your work also experiments with the built form in the aftermath of design, where users often 'read' and reconfigure their own environments?

Yes, our work specifically focuses upon how we understand ideas of ‘use' and ‘misuse' in terms of the public's interaction with built environments. We are really interested in how public space is designed with a certain in-built anxiety, an anxiety predicated upon a fear and expectation of misuse.

There seems to be a strong sense of fragility in your work, particularly concerning the grammar of urban architecture, does all of this relate back to that ‘in-built anxiety'?

This sense of fragility in the work is intended to highlight the inherent lack of stability within the fabric of urban space, that in-built anxiety. The constant act of trying to achieve this stability has the adverse affect, rendering social spaces even more fragile. Our work suggests that this lack of stability should be understood as a key factor in how we shape the built environs.

So have you come across any buildings or infrastructure in Dublin that you think could benefit from a few cracked windows?

Well there does appear to be some newer developments that certainly have suffered from both poor planning and the recent economic downturn. Big new empty buildings with vacant public spaces attached.

The Problem with Stability runs in Pallas Contemporary Projects from 30 January until 13 March, Thursday to Saturday, 12-6pm.

Words Padraig Moran