Curator Christina Kennedy introduces sculptor Orla de Brí's new exhibition Out of the Shadows, currently running at Dublin's Solomon Gallery.

Earlier in her career Orla de Brí referenced Nietzsche’s famous quote ‘Invisible threads are the strongest ties’, as being significant to her work - his belief that the intangible ties formed by emotions, memories, and subconscious links are more powerful and enduring than external, physical, even personal connections that hold people together. That notion has remained an abiding undercurrent and is present in the artist’s new body of work entitled ‘Out of the Shadows’. She observes: In a world often marked by uncertainty and darkness, a shadow is more than the absence of light; it is a place where the unseen resides... It holds the forgotten, the unspoken, the hidden part of ourselves and our world. (1)

She Stag

De Brí marks out this new series of works as a sculptural exploration of the individual and collective shadows where we encounter fear, change, loss, silence and resilience. Confronting these ideas the title work, ‘Out of the Shadows’, depicts a gleaming white, near life-size crouching ‘She Stag’ figure, a recurring motif in de Brí’s oeuvre. In it the antlers of a stag protrude from a woman’s head spreading out like a tree with a body that waits poised for action as though within a dark forest or near its edge where nature is encroached upon by human habitation. A sexual decoration and a form of weapon in the deer kingdom, antlers are found on female reindeer, which are shed annually and regrow. The artist reflects on the series as a whole: it’s about transformation, learning, adapting, nurturing strength and finding unexpected light. (2)

Intimately connected with the natural world and its hybridity are ‘Ms Clandestine Light’ and ‘Ms Clandestine Dark’, elongated female figures with mushroom heads, each 2.5 metres tall, one matte white and the other dark black/ brown, towering over the other pieces and with the She-Stag, providing the conceptual heart of the exhibition. De Brí has had a lifelong fascination with mushrooms, the biggest living organism on the planet. Their fecundity is afforded by their massive network of fibres, in particular mycelium with its carbon sequestering ability so vital for life, growing and nurturing not just its own species but old and weak trees.

This is arguably de Brí's most accomplished work to date, cathartic, thematically resolved and technically excellent.

Silently and sentiently it supports the entire ecosphere, a carrier of hybrid forms that fuse gender as well as elements of animal, human and plant. The bacteria that make up a person’s gut microbiome, shows that there truly is a bestiary within us all. These are processes that bind us together even if we don’t see them.

De Brí’s works connote not just nature’s but our hidden strands, secreted between shade and light, the one revealing the other: As people we only reveal a small part of ourselves, so much is hidden both dark and light. Her sculptures are an invitation to witness vulnerability, wildness and endurance. From the depths of shadow, light takes shape. (3)

Fragile Architecture

Mainly female but sometimes male, de Brí’s sculptures are harbingers and symbols of emotional states. Their attributes are often where the head should be, such as an open book with fluttering pages, a miniature house with no windows and doors, or with appendages such as wings, antlers, lobster claws. All are metaphors for states of mind. Some possess a talismanic, guardian quality, particularly potent in the She-Stag, ‘Gaia’ and the mushroom- headed figures.

Bookhead Female / Bookhead Male

Gender balance, equality and hybridity underlie all of de Brí’s thinking. Throughout her practice she uses figuration in highly stylised form. Attenuated, naked, mainly female bodies in different guises are the armature for all of her ideas and deeply held convictions, both in her public and private commissions as well as her gallery works. Seeming androgynous if not for the size of the breasts, they sometimes veer precipitously towards the beauty body-size standard, not without risk even for a female artist in a world of sensitised discourse around the gender of the gaze, identity politics and female empowerment. The artist’s early training in fashion design with its typologies of form may still echo here. To this writer, de Brí’s figures have a chimeric quality that fuses the personal with the planetary, with ecological shamanism, mythology and perhaps futurism too in that they may defy organic decay and transit the ages, cyber-organic versions of the human species.

This is arguably de Brí’s most accomplished work to date, cathartic, thematically resolved and technically excellent. Like her heroine, Louise Bourgeois, who almost always focused on the human form but constantly challenged herself to recalibrate her forms, perhaps the time is now right for de Brí to move into a new phase, to push her work in new directions, to test the waters. She may need to take a step into an area which she doesn’t know - into the dark. The work will take her where it needs to go.

Christina Kennedy is Senior Curator: Head of Collections at IMMA.

 Out of the Shadows is at Solomon Gallery, Dublin until 18th October 2025 - find out more here

(1/2/3) All quotes taken from the artist’s concept statement for ‘Out of the Shadows’, 2025 (unpublished)