For her exhibition, Fault Trace, in the Beacon Room Project Space at BAU Gallery, Beacon, NY, McNulty constructed a unique ephemeral floor piece on-site with loose slate and finely-cut hair. She also showed five related works in the form of sculpture, intervention on the gallery wall, and works on paper using salvaged and organic materials, which she calls Embodied Drawings.
Her work in the Beacon Room associates the language, formal characteristics, and materiality of geology with traces of architecture and her body. In geological terms, a “fault trace” is the place where a fault, or fracture, in the rock strata can be seen or mapped on the earth’s surface. The work on exhibit explores the fault as a space of relational possibility between self and other, where radically different temporalities intersect, structure cleaves, and material identities may be reconfigured.
Alison McNulty is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work examines the ubiquitous traces of our living. She often works in relation to overlooked sites and neglected architectural spaces using ordinary, reclaimed materials like brick, dust, hair, fur, wood, bits of eraser, and rock to explore the fragility and entanglement of things, materials, systems of knowledge, environments, relationships, and bodies. Much of what she makes doesn’t last long or is not fixed, and its lack of permanence and contingency are meant to exhibit and explore this fragility and correlation.
