brittle record

Municipal Gallery Lexicon

14th February - April 2nd 2025

Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council is delighted to present an exhibition of new artworks by Martina O’Brien, brittle record. O’Brien was awarded the 2024 dlr Visual Art Commission Exhibition; this is funded by the Arts Council of Ireland and supported by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council.

Dún Laoghaire Harbour opens out to the Irish Sea: a fluid receptacle of maritime crossings and chemical contamination, submerged ships and intricate ecosystems. Bringing together video installations, printmaking and archival material, brittle record considers the ocean as a vast, shifting archive of unsettled materials. The exhibition draws on O’Brien’s time on marine expedition artist residencies in Oslofjord and the Arctic Ocean, alongside close attention to coastal and subsea environments in Dún Laoghaire and the Irish Sea. Traversing the lingering matter of maritime empire and contemporary ocean data-making, brittle record responds to multiple agents of oceanic memory, including biophysical systems of sediments and marine life that encode, store, and release buried underwater histories to be reckoned with in a time of environmental breakdown.