DABF23 Publication launch: 'Things Left Undone' by Jes Fernie

15 December 2023, 6pm

Join ACA PUBLIC co-editor Sean Lynch for the launch of Jes Fernie’s new publication Things Left Undone Unsaid Uncelebrated Unplanned Unfinished

Join us for the launch of Jes Fernie’s new publication Things Left Undone Unsaid Uncelebrated Unplanned Unfinished as part of Dublin Art Book Fair 2023. In discussion with editor Sean Lynch, TBG+S Programme Curator Michael Hill will uncover the ideas and encounters beyond Jes' book, that in her own words is ‘a selection of mad, frayed, totally normal stories about undone, uncelebrated, abandoned things. They are spectacular, strange, problematic, hurtful, funny, ludicrous tales. They tell a bigger, messier story, rather than one that has been honed or finely crafted.’

In writing about how art gets made, what happens to it, and how world affairs, personal circumstances, and misfortune bump up against dreams and hard graft, Fernie notes that her encounters are not usually told in a world where success and bombast are prized. Rather, she recognises and even celebrates the vulnerability, the strangeness and the arbitrariness of artistic endeavour and much of life in general: ‘Perhaps there is a catharsis that comes with this, not solely based on a sense of jouissance experienced on discovering that other people’s achievements aren’t quite as dazzling as you had marked them out to be, but also just the relief – the pure, physical, glorious relief – that we no longer have to hold things together, to hone a narrative with no sharp edges.’

Featuring Flemish-Irish artist Lily Van Oost, filmmaker Bob Quinn, the adventures of American artists Lawrence Weiner, Richard Serra and James Turrell in Ireland, sculptor Eilis O'Connell and writer Maeve Brennan, the publication is on sale at a special discounted price of €10.

Things Left Undone is published by ACA PUBLIC, an initiative of Askeaton Contemporary Arts in County Limerick, and is designed in partnership with Daly & Lyon.

Jes Fernie is a UK-based independent curator, writer and lecturer, interested in the social, political and environmental context in which art is made, situated, and viewed. In 2021, she launched the Archive of Destruction, a research project that brings together narratives around public sculpture that has been destroyed by rage, boredom, fear, greed and love.

Sean Lynch is co-editor, alongside Michele Horrigan and Niamh Moriarty, of ACA PUBLIC, with over a dozen titles now available. He represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and has presented prominent exhibitions at Edinburgh Art Festival; City of Melbourne; Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; Modern Art Oxford and CAPC Bordeaux.

This event takes place as part of Dublin Art Book Fair 2023: Polyphonic, sponsored by Henry J Lyons and supported by Dublin UNESCO City of Literature.

Image Description: A close-up view of a young woman, who appears to be screaming at the top of her voice. To the left, another figure in the foreground can be made out, looking at her in close proximity.