Unworlding

Patrick Hough: UnWorlding

UnWorlding explores wildness, the untamed, the feral and the unruly, not as chaos but as a force that resists control. Bringing together film, photography and sculptural installations incorporating readymade objects, the exhibition gathers figures and sites where this wildness persists: in landscapes shaped by colonial violence, in the unruly terrains of queer desire, and in forms of life that exceed the boundaries imposed by the human.

Presented across the two floors of Galway Arts Centre, the exhibition traces a constellation of figures and sites where this wildness takes form. The wolf appears as a spectral presence, a reminder of what colonial violence sought to eradicate. The cruising ground emerges as a landscape of unruly desire. The dance floor becomes a space of ecstatic collective unmaking. A medieval saint blurs the boundaries between sacred and profane, while monstrous forms resist easy recognition altogether.

At the centre of the exhibition is a new 16mm film, Landscapes of Shame. The film traces the extinction of the Irish grey wolf through the violent landscape transformations of British colonisation and the cultural logics that accompanied it. Moving between folklore, personal memory and archival histories, the work reflects on how the eradication of the wolf continues to echo through Ireland’s ecological, cultural and queer histories.

This exhibition is funded by the Arts Council through a Visual Arts Project Award. The exhibition is curated by Megs Morley and produced by Tracy Bass.

Patrick Hough is an artist from Offaly working with moving image across gallery and cinema contexts. Their practice traces the entanglement of archaeological, geological and ecological worlds, folding deep time into lived experience and material memory. Each project begins with a lingering image, a body lifted from peat, a whale stranded in an Irish bog, and develops through research led moving image installations. Within these works, distinctions between human and nonhuman, life and decay loosen, allowing feral forms of relation to surface.

Their work has been exhibited and screened internationally at institutions including Whitechapel Gallery, London; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; MAAT, Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon; CPH:DOX, Copenhagen; Para Site, Hong Kong; and the Jing’an International Sculpture Project, Shanghai. They are a recipient of the Jerwood FVU Awards (2017) and a Film London FLAMIN Productions Award (2019).