Jennifer O’Brien

Jennifer O’Brien is a Dublin-based artist whose practice interrogates the historical and personal entanglements embedded within Irish infrastructure.

The Irish state’s pursuit of modernity informs a critical inquiry into how these ambitions continue to shape both landscape and lived experience in contemporary Ireland.

Challenging the enduring logic of the modernist utopia through an ideology of stasis, Apply Handbrake in The Moments Prior centres the West-Link Bridge and IKEA as locations where the banal and the spectacular convene.

Working closely with her father, the influence of his career as a mechanic informs an automotive material language, while an artificial horizon orientates the viewer by appropriating the ambient conditions of these interzones. Reams of text and reflections written in response to these sites introduce a temporality that resists the logic of the road and perpetual motion.