On the 25th anniversary of the Guinness Storehouse, These Walls: Landmarks brings together artists Hazel O'Sullivan and Niall de Buitléar to revisit a pivotal chapter in Irish art history: the ROSC exhibitions of 1984 and 1988, held at the Guinness Hopstore, which introduced ambitious Irish and international art to Dublin.
Ahead of this year's Dublin Gallery Weekend, Hazel O'Sullivan introduces her 'Discworks' below.
I popped to The British Museum for a visit on my birthday in February, 2024 and came across the ‘Irish Disc’ - an ‘artefact of unknown function’, a displaced and beautiful object that I couldn’t believe I was discovering in London. I started thinking what else should or shouldn’t I be discovering in London, and what other Irish artefacts were there? When Archetype offered me this commission at The Guinness Storehouse, I was in the middle of the first day of install for my recent solo exhibition ‘Circa Ré’ at The Kerlin Gallery in Dublin. I was pretty adrenaline filled from the install alone when I got a call from Muireann O’Sullivan describing an opportunity connected to the legacy of the ROSC exhibitions (1967-88) at the Guinness Storehouse. It kind of made perfect sense, and I wondered why I hadn’t thought of researching ROSC relative to my practice already - and research is what followed.
A visit to the Guinness Archive was arranged with Guinness Archive & Heritage Manager, Eibhlin Colgan, who generously introduced me to original documents and photographs. My Granddad founded a motor rewinds company that often does work for Guinnesses which my Mam now owns and operates and my Dad was an electrical technician at Guinnesses for nearly 16 years, so it felt nostalgic and familiar to be in the area and in the archives. We had a flick through the exhibition catalogues and I knew from personal familiarity that ROSC was controversial for many reasons, and that ’67 and ’71 had no Irish artists and few female artists exhibited, so I was drawn to these years.
I was particularly drawn to the Celtic Art exhibition that ran alongside ROSC '67 at the National Museum of Ireland, and towards the end of the catalogue I noticed a familiar image - the ‘Irish Disc’. But it wasn’t the one I’d seen in London on my birthday, it was one of seven Monasterevin-type discs, six of which are held at the National Museum of Ireland.
Seven Irish discs!
We were commissioned to make six unique artworks - so six discs it was going to be.
I wanted the discs to be reimagined in my work not exactly as themselves, but as iterations of all six in each painting, reinterpreted as futuristic entities or devices that expand on that mysterious function. It wasn’t until researching ROSC that I realised my artworks have an obvious Modernist tone, informed obviously by a Euro-American arts education, where a lot of the featured ROSC artists were some of my favourites in university. I started thinking about agrarian societies and how current contemporary art practices have generationally formed despite industrial conditions that shaped modernism elsewhere, and how an Irish approach to Modernist Abstraction and Atomic Age aesthetics (reimagined as relevant again in this era) are an important feature and increasing fixture in my practice. This series ‘Discworks’ at the Guinness Storehouse are a homage to the supplementary Celtic art exhibition of ROSC '67, and I feel grateful to showcase these discs as centrepieces with incredible works by Niall de Buitléar.
These Walls: Landmarks is at the Guinness Storehouse Dublin from November 7th - 9th, as part of the Dublin Gallery Weekend 2025 - find out more here.
