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WORDS Tom Lordan PHOTO Louis Haugh kitchen towels
resting on the seat. A slim, diagonal pathway bisects the hazelnut earth. Mirroring the left-hand side, another tapestry depicts the garden that her grandparents enjoyed when they moved to the suburbs from their inner city flat. According to one of her social media posts, Malone has sharp memories of her grandmother’s “beloved rose bush,” portrayed in detail here. The surreality of these installation spaces underline the irrational element of nostalgia, a subject that has often been remarked upon, insofar as nostalgia involves both an ache for something that is gone and a fantasmatic privileging of the absent object. In the event that an object of nostalgia returns, the result is only ever disappointment, as the spectral lustre that swathes the object in your memory never materialises. A third installation completes Malone’s investigation into her grandmother’s home upstairs. The first floor is a continuation of the aesthetic established by the ground-floor constructions: single items of plain, antiquated furniture are placed at a distance from one another, amidst large pools of flecked white material, which you swiftly discover is pebbledash. Pebbledash is a cheap, efficient way to protect the external walls of houses from wind and rain, and was used liberally by the Dublin Corporation under Simms. It has since become something of an architectural albatross – typically the public associates pebbledash with inexpensive social housing, and its presence usually devalues the property of the home it protects. Here, in Malone’s world, it acts as a series of islands, bringing separate objects into one domestic archipelago. On the first floor, the words that you heard earlier, spoken by Malone’s grandmother, suddenly become clear. It’s a poem “titled Old Woman of the Road, by Padraic Colum and it was written in the early 1900s. It was my grandmother’s favourite and the recording is from a few years back in her kitchen. In the poem Colum speaks about yearning for a home in a rural context.” For Malone, the poem is an eloquent reminder that this yearning is “intergenerational”. On the ground floor there is an RTE archive film from the 1960s. A reporter speaks to people who are moving from their homes in the inner-city to new houses in the suburbs, paralleling the story of Malone’s grandmother. Many people depicted by the B&W footage are deeply angered by the conditions they have been living in, and hold only a small flame of hope that their new homes will be better. One man refers to his experience of living in a tent as an act of protest against the ineptitude of local politicians, who fail to produce affordable, adequate housing. As always with Malone, the autobiographical element quickly sparks a return to the present, and her sensitivity to class politics sharpens to a razor’s edge. The curator Sheena Barrett remembers seeing Malone’s undergraduate degree show “and was so impressed by her exhibition. The sheer determination to produce something that ambitious despite the many constraints was already impressive but the treatment of the subject matter, the finish of the works, and the cohesiveness of the show were exceptional. I was curious to find out more.” Barrett’s careful attention has paid off tenfold in this exhibition, and as the curator alludes to, Malone’s youth makes it even more exciting. She has a talent, says Barrett, for “realising large scale installations.” I expect that this show will be the first in a long career. O, to have a little house runs at The LAB Gallery, Foley Street, until November 5. michellemalone.net 49