Irish Life Centre’s gold windows given a new life in the reflective art of Niamh O’Malley

Niamh O’Malley: Pure Gold

On Friday, June 20th, 1975, the property pages of The Irish Times mentioned plans for a new Irish Life Centre on Lower Abbey Street in Dublin mentioned the building’s extraordinary solar-control windows. Almost incredulously, the writer stated not once but twice that the glass’s heat shielding would be provided by a film of pure gold.

A half-century later, Niamh O’Malley’s solo show at Visual Centre for Contemporary Art in Carlow has taken its title from that quietly breathless report and its physical materials from the windows themselves.

O’Malley, who in 2022 represented Ireland at the 59th Venice Biennale, has long been known for working with glass, metal and repurposed materials. With her work studio currently housed in the Irish Life complex, she found an opportunity to acquire some of the gold windows being removed from the centre and out of these create a new body of work exploring the particularities of such a unique, site-specific material.

Pure Gold is a show in five groupings. At the centre of the space is Lights (2026), an arrangement of 15 vertical steel rods on bases, each topped with an incandescent bulb and two adjustable screens of the golden glass. These panels, set to various angles on hinges, are distinctly armlike, and the sense of deeply abstracted human forms they offer brings to mind the elemental gauntness of Giacometti’s figures.

Nearby, leaning against a gallery wall, is Eyes (2026), a glowing trio of large pointed ovals. Positioned almost as if in suspended motion, they both mirror the viewer and seem to allow the gallery itself to stare back, the vacant holes at their centre appearing simultaneously as pupils and architectural oculi.

[ Dún Laoghaire artist Johnman’s cancer story: ‘I’m a big man and I’m used to being strong’Opens in new window ]

On the opposite wall, the geometric glass forms of a series of works are incorporated, it seems, into the imposing height of the Visual gallery by steel armatures running to the ceiling. The strategy elevates the works – tellingly named Flight (2026) – both severing their connection to gravity and drawing one’s gaze skyward. It’s a bold attempt to capitalise on the loftiness of the space, but it has the strange effect of making the sculptures appear almost as corporate logos tagged to the side of a building.

For all the magnetism that these glass works have, it is the comparatively unassuming video work titled Film (2026), presented on free-standing LED panels facing the lamps, that little by little comes to feel like the central, decisive gesture within the show.

Capturing the shadowy movements of an anonymous public moving outside the opaque windows of O’Malley’s Abbey Street studio, the footage is presented in a mirrored, stereoscopic form. This gives them the appearance of a Rorschach test, reflecting an exterior and interior world at once, a vision bound up inextricably with our desires, wishes and projections.

O’Malley completes her show with a set of graphite drawings that echo and amplify this: five heavily worked panels, marked and traced upon until all legibility has been obliterated, beautiful but impenetrable screens on which the markings of the artist can only ever throw the viewer back upon themselves.

Pure Gold is at Visual Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow, until January 10th, 2027