Born in Ireland, 1963. Lives and works in Bristol. 'Daphne Wright's work plays with the desire we seem to have for an encounter with beauty in art. Much of her work is visually stunning in a relatively conventional sense. Yet what is central to these works is that on both the macro and micro scale - the distanced and the intimate - Wright willfully undermines this promise of pleasure.'
Daphne Wright's work was the subject of a solo exhibition at Limerick City Art Gallery earlier this year. Wright has been involved in several important international group exhibitions, notably at PS1, New York; Albright Knox Museum, Buffalo; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, and at the ICA, Boston.

Moles
Meadow Gallery commission (2007)

A single molehill on a perfect lawn in the middle of a beautifully composed garden is enough to tip the whole picture into disorder, enough to break the spell of beauty and harmony. At Hanbury Hall like in any garden the mole competes with the common weed as enemy number one. The rodents are like ‘little terrorists’ threatening our aesthetic order and gardeners everywhere have responded to their subversive attacks with a ‘war’ of their own. In the countryside, pests are destroyed when they threaten the livelihood of those who live off the land. An age-old custom is to expose the culled animals, by creating gibbets in a gesture that refers to warning and protection. In the context the garden though they are pest only to our desire for flawlessness. Here at Hanbury resin casts that were taken from specimens that have been destroyed in a humane way as part of a routine culling operation are displayed on the old wall of the orchard garden. An embodiment of the sometimes sinister efforts we make to maintain order, they represent of the price to be paid for visual perfection.

Throat
Surround sound
Meadow Gallery commission, (2007)

Dating back to the early 18c “Snob’s” tunnel was designed as a route for the estate worker between their working place and the house. The idea was that they should not be seen by the owners and visitor and ‘spoil’ the perfect vistas. The sound installation Throat is designed in surround-sound to be experienced as an auditory journey while passing through the tunnel. We can hear the voice of an old woman uttering basic phonetic sounds, like a child learning to speak. This collision of an old voice nearing the last breath and the childlike utterances creates a haunting space between silence and words. In this emotional resonance are all the words that might have been spoken by voices now stilled.

Nonsense and Death
Tin foil, wire, paint and continuous loop tape
Courtesy of the artist (1998)

Four rows of skeletal trees ‘sprout’ out of concrete bases as if in a suspended state, all at once growing and decaying. Some are heavy with a dark growth of fruit and flowers, others are nearly bare. A pair of tiny pink herons watches over the scene. Playing over the installation, the voice of an old woman recites without pause Edward Lear’s nonsense rhymes about a series of old men and their ridiculous deaths.

Swan
Cast marble
Meadow Gallery commission (2007)

As we encounter Swan lying, wings turned upwards on a plinth, we immediately recognise it as a sculpture, as an object we have encountered previously throughout the history of art: the fallen cupids, winged victories, the still life with birds. The sculpture stands near a reflective pool, under the bows of a weeping willow, itself a symbol of death. However, our familiarity with the body and its mode of display, becomes fractured as soon as we realise the swan is dead: Swan exists as an impression of the corpse now absent (the cast was taken from a specimen found dead in a swan sanctuary). We have become so familiar with the aesthetic sources of our inner visual landscape that we often don’t register the individual objects anymore, let alone their actual meaning.

The swan is not a symbol or a pleasing aesthetic mark in the composition of a picture, it is a live being that can also die.