Cillian Finnerty—Several Small Motors

Pallas Projects/Studios are pleased to present Cillian Finnerty—Several Small Motors, the first exhibition of our 2025 Artist-Initiated Projects programme.

Several Small Motors is an exhibition featuring sequences of works that overlap in their concerns, tracing a number of thematic vectors which circle one another, eclipsing or intersecting so that the exhibition takes on the form of something like a game, a puzzle, or rebus which is open to multiple, potentially contradictory, readings or interpretations.

Throughout the course of the exhibition, components will be added, altered, or removed on different days. Sliders will be turned on or off, while consoles (and the objects for which they serve as plinths) will be added to or removed from the exhibition space. In this way, the exhibition is not an entirely stable entity, but rather something that shifts and changes. Component parts of the exhibition have ‘shifts’, and will participate in the exhibition in ways similar to how precarious or casual workers participate in the functioning of a business.

1. Imagine a situation in which language drifts away from its referents: the world comes untethered from our primary mode of comprehending it, materiality retreats from view like a boat that slowly tips over a distant horizon. Language, still in use, becomes so elastic, so hyperplastic, that the sheer range of meanings that could belong to any particular sentence renders it capable of meaning just about anything. The ways we have of navigating our environments, the ways we’re used to, would have to be rerouted so that we rely on other, murkier methods of categorisation. The material world is still there of course, objects and locations still hanging around awkwardly in all their sullen muteness, but language, blocked from its normal set of destinations, is left to flutter around haphazardly, tracing the confused flight paths of a moth that only occasionally orbits a light source.

2. I’ve been thinking about metaphors and symbols that are ‘weak’, where the connection between the symbol and what it refers to is tenuous, maybe diluted, a little like a machine that needs to be thumped to work as intended. The metaphor, like a worker in a gig economy, might work regularly, but not work all the time, and when and where the metaphor might do what you want would be essentially unreliable, slipping out of one’s hands like a cartoon character slips on a banana, to effects that might be comical but that might also result in minor injury.

3. Some tools – generally, ones that are simpler in design – can serve many purposes, while others are designed with very particular uses in mind, sometimes to the extent that the only thing they are really good for is that specific purpose. It’s not really a question of one kind of tool being ‘better’ than the other, both types serve their purpose: sometimes specificity is what you’re after, and other times you want something less defined.

Event

Biography:

Cillian Finnerty is an artist based between London and Co. Mayo, whose work makes significant use of found material to create gamelike forms and diagrammatic assemblages in which meaning is deferred or obscured. Juxtaposed imagery and objects from eclectic provenances are combined to investigate ways in which relations to property and technological production shape our cultural consciousness in ways that are surreal, melancholy, and sometimes humorous.

Cillian is a graduate of the Painting BFA at the National College of Art and Design (2016), MA Publishing at London College of Communications (2022) and School of the Damned, a peer-led alternative art education programme (2022-2024). Recent presentations of work include Remains (Greatorex Street, London), Permanent Mirage with Cóilín O'Connell (Radion, Amsterdam), and MUD (St. Anne's House, Bristol). Forthcoming exhibitions include a two-person exhibition with Timothy Furey at the Complex (Dublin, 2025), and an online presentation with Cóilín O’Connell for Feature Creep. He received the Agility Award in 2023 and 2024, and the Project Award 2024 from the Arts Council.

 Instagram: @cillianfinnerty

Website: cillian-finnerty.info

Artist-Initiated Projects at Pallas Projects/Studios is an open-submission, annual gallery programme of 8 x 3-week exhibitions taking place from March-November 2025. This unique programme of funded, artist-initiated projects selected via open call is highly accessible to artists, with a focus on early career, emerging artists and recent graduates. Projects are supplemented with artists' talks, texts, workshops or performances, and gallery visits by colleges and local schools.