Social Distancing

Location: Victorian People’s Flower Gardens, Phoenix Park, Dublin. 

Plinth belonging to the statue of George William Frederick Howard, 7th Earl of Carlisle. Viceroy to Ireland. 

“This action is part of the ongoing project ‘Queering the Landscape’ in which Fay sets out to reclaim spaces, askew narratives, and unite the body/mind with its surroundings. The title Social Distancing (ironic) has less to do with the current Pandemic and more to do with the gulf that class systems and power structures create in community and society at large.”  

Francis Fay is an Irish artist active on the domestic scene since 2012, and whose performance and curatorial projects have been presented nationwide at galleries, theatres, libraries and public spaces. Fay’s work Queering The Landscape is an ongoing project with a focus on power structures, reclamation and ownership of space. Fay looks at the development of  multiple identities and the opportunity to be the star in one’s own ‘movie’. The artist explores appearance,  veneers, masks and the investment by individuals and society  in  utopias.