Angela Fulcher × Maeve Connolly

I first encountered Angela Fulcher’s Blinkers in the exhibition Seachange, curated by Mary Cremin for TULCA at the mid-point of the decade now drawing to a close. Incorporating densely patterned textiles, similar to those often found on buses or trains, Fulcher’s sculptural forms partly resemble disarticulated car parts. While alluding the car as a design object, bound up with fantasies of personal mobility, Blinkers also celebrates the more mundane aesthetics of public transit. Fulcher’s work materialises the fragmented imagination of transport, whether as idealised bodily extension or as always-incomplete infrastructural system. To wear blinkers is to look only in one direction, but Fulcher’s objects manifest a more complex orientation. Crafted from textiles designed to endure beyond the moment of their making, her work preserves a vision of the future rooted in an earlier moment, refusing to illuminate any one way forward.

Maeve Connolly is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Film, Art & Creative Technologies at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology, where she teaches on the BA in Art and co-chairs the Masters in Art and Research Collaboration (ARC).