Speculative Objects is an ongoing series of art works that incorporate text and object. The unfinished nature of this series is integral to O’Riley’s ideas of the open-ended as being a key element of Fine Art research. These works feature associative inscriptions determined by an object’s function or purpose. For example, here is a bench that was used to seat viewers of a 2-hour animation of an orbit around the moon. This was inspired by Michael Collins’ Apollo 11 mission during which he orbited the moon alone, while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the lunar surface for the first time. An animation was made using data of the moon’s surface collected in 1994 by a spacecraft called Clementine, so named after the folk song, Oh My Darling Clementine! O’Riley’s bench features the first words of the song engraved onto its surface. As an ongoing project made up of a number of elements or instances, the works question the form an artwork can take. The language of art is speculated on, scrutinised and extended by being projected through and inscribed into, particular objects.

A work from this series was included, together with a text by O’Riley, in a book dedicated to Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at University of Oxford: Assimina Kaniari & Marina Wallace (eds.), Acts of Seeing: Artists, Scientists and the History of the Visual, London: Zidane Press, 2009 ISBN 978-0-9554850-8-4. A selection from Speculative Objects was exhibited in Spring 2011 at the library of Chelsea College of Art & Design.