Marie Farrington and Kate Strain
Artist's talk
18 October 2025
Diagonal Acts is an ambitious new multi-platform project by Marie Farrington spanning 2025. Beginning at the entrance of Kunstverein Aughrim in Spring 2025, the project continues with public workshops at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin, and culminates with exhibitions at The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon and Commonage Projects, London.
Diagonal Acts explores themes of memory, place and connection, reflecting on gaps, fragments, edges and thresholds within archaeology, geology, sculpture and staged performance. The exhibition uses diagonal lines as a way to map and imagine the movements across and between such disciplines. There is a significant focus on how the body connects to these themes.
The exhibition includes sculptures made from a range of materials, including wax, stone, glass and steel. The material outcomes in Diagonal Acts are supported by a range of collaborations, and connected by a public programme of generative elements devised to critically engage audiences in person and online, enhancing and expanding participation and access. These include —
- Technical drawings of Marie's artworks by archaeological illustrator Róisín O'Meadhra
- 'Leaning and Lifting', a response text by writer Megan Macedo
- A website for the project, created by graphic designer Alex Synge
- A set of sculptures inspired by excavation tools, made by various artists including a steel sieve for sifting soil and a spade made from soil, created by Marie; a sculptural wheelbarrow for transporting soil samples made by artist Liliane Puthod; and a blanket created utilising earthworm waste to nourish soil, by Laura Ní Fhlaibhín.
Diagonal Acts arises from research into geological and archaeological imaginations of gaps, openings and thresholds, exploring the boundaries of the body in the landscape from various counter-topographical perspectives.
The project expands on and elaborates a hybrid practice of ‘Theatre/Archaeology’ (Shanks/Pearson, 2001) exploring symmetries between staged presentations and field work via their continual renegotiation of categorical boundaries and their shared interest in memory, partiality, fragment, trace and assemblage.
Through intrinsically contingent material interventions and participatory gestures, Diagonal Acts excavates the ‘/’ in Theatre/Archaeology as a site of interdisciplinarity, convergence, and borders reworked, articulated through the sculptural position of the diagonal line. Thinking across and between sites through conditional modes of encounter, Diagonal Acts explores diagonality as a relational and collaborative stance, temporarily ‘leaning’ against contexts, communities and histories.
Diagonal Acts is curated by Kate Strain, Director of Kunstverein Aughrim. Diagonal Acts is accompanied by Kunstverein Aughrim in a curatorial capacity throughout 2025. The project is supported by the Arts Council (through a Visual Arts Project Award 2025), Culture Ireland, and Wicklow County Arts Office, through the annual Strategic Project Award Scheme.
