Nollaig Molloy – at a distance

at a distance accumulates multiple spaces in which Nollaig has experienced and searched for, the Cormorant. Merging cultural references, myth and scientific information, a film, of the same title, forms the centre of the exhibition. It visually combines real-time performance with life-size collages on an island habitat, alongside interactions with specimens from a Natural History archive and a selection of stop-motion animation using pop-up paper techniques. In its consideration of myth within cinematic language, the film incorporates digital and analogue effects to investigate how fact, fiction and observation offer strategies for identifying and speaking about our shifting relationship with the natural and mediated world.

This film forms part of an ongoing body of work in which Nollaig has been researching the many representations, symbols and decoys of the Cormorant, a predominantly coastal bird. Through conversations with archivists, librarians, Liverpudlians, ornithologists, anglers and environmentalists, she explores this bird’s perceived and observed character.

Biography:

Nollaig Molloy is a visual artist from Roscommon. She received her Master of Fine Art from Belfast College of Art at Ulster University in 2020 and a BA (Hons) History of Art and Fine Art, Sculpture from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin in 2012. Her practice develops ideas of land use, delving into archives, material-to-hand, and history within specific sites. Using video, animation and sculptural installation, she is interested in the idea of ‘material-to-hand’ drawing attention to physical labour in contemporary contexts. Through in-depth research and engagement with archives and environments, she focuses on the interplay between material, people and their surroundings.

Nollaig Molloy is currently an Artist-Researcher with Creative Places Ballaghaderreen. In 2023 she was an artist-in-residence with Urbane Kunste Ruhr and The History of the Ruhr Foundation, an archive and library for social movements in the Ruhr, Bochum, Germany where she researched connections between land, archival documents, and practices within both. In December 2023, she presented this research at the symposium From the Archives: Artists in the archive in Bochum, Germany. Her artist publication Retreat to Stone, Stone in Retreat (2021) was recently acquired by NIVAL and The British Library. She received funding from Roscommon County Council from 2015-2023.