Earth Solace & Blight

Curated by Dr. Margarita Cappock

The exhibition will be formally launched by Orla Hegarty, architect & Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture, Planning & Environmental Policy at University College, Dublin on Friday, 6 November at 6.00pm.   This event takes place as part of Dublin Gallery Weekend 2026. 

‘Something Rich and Strange’ draws its title from the book, The Secret Life of Buildings by Edward Hollis, who adapts the phrase from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Hollis describes his publication as ‘a book of tales about the lives that buildings lead, in the course of which they all change into ‘something rich and strange’. Artists Dorothy Smith and Mandy O’Neill have taken this premise as a point of departure for the exhibition, with the concepts of transformation, making and remaking as guiding principles. 

While the artists work in different mediums, Mandy O’Neill principally in photography and Dorothy Smith principally in drawing, commonalities exist in their approaches to the built environment. They often encounter subjects through walking or cycling the city and suburbs, drawn to everyday and quotidian details, repeatedly traversing the same routes, the artists observing both incremental and rapid change as they go, and responding to the material and social shifts in their immediate environments.

Dorothy Smith is a visual artist whose practice is concerned with the built environments in which people live and work and in particular the construction, materiality and lived experience of public space. Her particular interest is drawing and how it can interact with contemporary places and concerns. Her practice involves studio-based work, curation and publicly engaged projects.

Mandy O’Neill uses expanded photography practice in an instinctual and responsive manner, as a way to understand, process and contain the material and social realms in which we live. She is especially interested in our ever transforming and varied built environment – from schools and community venues, to housing and institutional buildings. Recent developments in O’Neill’s practice have included installation, text, video and sound, and a site-responsive approach to exhibition making.