Galleries

The Lost Works, Pink reimagines a number of Dunhill and O’Brien’s earlier lost works as soft, wall-hung forms. Suspended in a row, they begin to resemble a collection of tools, accessories or oddly specialised equipment.
 
Their stuffed, almost cuddly character is undercut by the intensity of the hot pink fabric, which gives the group a slightly overbearing and faintly repellent presence.

The Lost Works formed the other half of PLOT, Dunhill and O’Brien’s first collaborative exhibition at Cable Street Gallery in 1998.
 
One hundred small plasticine sculptures were made from memory, based on lost artworks and fragments of installations that the two artists had produced separately over previous years. These miniature reconstructions were arranged on shelves according to shape and structure rather than authorship, chronology or original context.
 
No information was given about the scale, material or motivation of the missing works, and nothing identified which artist had made either the original or its plasticine replacement. The only clue was a date pencilled on the wall above each object, marking the year in which the original work had been completed.
 
Shown alongside Stored, the work reversed its logic: there, existing artworks were hidden from view; here, absent works were brought back as small, uncertain substitutes.
 

Stored formed one half of PLOT at Cable Street Gallery, London, in 1998, Dunhill and O’Brien’s first collaborative exhibition.
 
What had initially seemed like a temporary excursion from their individual practices began to raise more awkward questions about the impulse to keep making new work. For Stored, they perversely brought a large number of earlier artworks out of storage — almost enough to make a small retrospective — then mixed them up and grouped them together, concealing them beneath tailor-made vinyl covers.
 
The coverings created new, looming and slightly peculiar forms. Words taken from the titles of the hidden works were printed at either end; detached from their original context, they began to read like instructions for how the covered objects might be approached.
 
Shown alongside The Lost Works, the installation treated the artists’ previous work less as material to be displayed than as lumber caught in an awkward procession.
 

This was Dunhill and O’Brien’s first collaborative work, made through a deliberately simple division of labour: one artist made a structure, the other made a cover for it.
 
The structure incorporated a slide projector and assorted studio materials, some hinged together, others held in place more provisionally by the tailor-made translucent jacket. Everything was designed so that the work could be dismantled and packed away.
 
The projected slides were close-up photographs of members of the artists’ families, introducing something troubling and intimate into what otherwise resembled an awkward piece of temporary apparatus.

Notes on Holes in Sculpture began as a spoken presentation: part lecture, part list, part slightly overextended enquiry into the unsung heroes of sculpture.