Formal and Wild

Curated by Dr. Margarita Cappock

About the exhibition

‘Formal and Wild  Landscapes’ by Fergus Martin can be described as an exhibition of illusions and dreams. It incorporates sculpture, animation, photographic prints and sound projections that connect at an emotional and subliminal level. 

Every aspect of the exhibition, from its commencement in the cube space to the culmination in the upper gallery, provides the viewer with an invisible kinetic experience as the art works ‘ping’ against each other and relate sequentially to what the viewer will encounter next. The animation has as its starting point an idea the artist had for a sculpture in a landscape and has taken on another life in the virtual world – a fantastical version of a pastoral scene.  

Martin notes, ‘It was sparked by my always seeing hay bales from trains. They always seem mysterious to me scattered over the landscape and make me think of how leprechauns fooled people who wanted their gold by placing rocks or hawthorn trees everywhere.  These hay bales appear to have landed from space and sit there day and night in every season.’ Some of the works in this exhibition have featured in a recent exhibition at the magnificent early eighteenth-century Palazzo Birago in Turin in 2025. Visitors now can view these works from an entirely different perspective here in the contemporary setting of the Lab gallery in Dublin.

Join us for a conversation on the exhibition Landscapes Formal and Wild with artist Fergus Martin and Sarah McAuliffe, Curator of Irish Art post 1900, National Gallery of Ireland.

The event will take place at 1.00pm on Thursday, 25 June in the LAB Gallery.