Reach Out and Touch Me was a group exhibition of work by Lynn-Marie Dennehy and Ashling O’Connell. The exhibition explored approaches to tactility and the physicality of making across video, sculpture and print. The exhibition also incorporated a reading space of zines and publications from the Rebel Reads archive.

Dennehy’s South Facade 22 of 44 is a life-sized, replica column from the colonnade at the south entrance of the British Museum, an institution that perpetuates imperial and colonial ideas in a post-imperial society. Scaled up from a screengrab to the approximate size of the original and printed on A4 sheets, the image becomes pixelated and distorted. O’Connell’s video piece Heartbreak Diet began with the idea of a wheel as a motif for social reproduction and an inner system of repeated actions, failures and dreams. It is a personal excavation of worth, value and work within the home and an attempt to elaborate on the idea of ‘home capital’.

The exhibition shifts across scale, process and material. The work takes the production process as a site of exploration, embracing mistakes and imperfections. An instinctual method of working by both artists demonstrates an intense curiosity and desire to make contact with the materials used. The work is evidence of action as it demonstrates thinking through making, layering and re-working, over and over again.

Photography by Niamh Murphy