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- Liam McHale
Liam
McHale
A Speculative Rural
The work installed for the degree show assessment is an installation piece containing an imagined rural environment. Consisting of cast found materials: a cement block and an offcut from a telephone pole. I cast multiples of each in various colors in plaster. Through the casting process I also incorporated non traditional materials such as sawdust, straw, hay in an effort to petrify them and constrict them into shapes that were non traditional to their organic state in an effort to other or Queer them. Taking these rural signifiers,I flipped them and expanded upon their traditional functions of feed/bedding in my aim of creating a rural environment in conversation with the pursuit of an embodied queer experience. I was interested in the idea of an expanded view of Queerness that looks at traditions for behaviours that stray from the non nuclear.
The foam figures are intended to portray the rural queer body: constricted and contorted, at a midway attempt at achieving the elusive grasp of citizenship. Their bodies of grass reflect the Queer body gone by and their hidden place in Irish society, still in places hidden in the rural of today. I wanted the figures grass side facing forward when the viewer walked in, when passing to the side another side to the installation becomes visible. One filled with colour and lightheartedness even amidst these contorted figures where some lay under great weight and obstacles.