Quantum Foam was a film installation commissioned for the Kinsale Arts Festival. An Arts Council of Ireland grant enabled an accompanying series of retrospective solo exhibitions, screenings and talks to follow the staging of the work in Kinsale at the Luan Gallery, Athlone, Wexford Arts Centre, Galway Art Centre and The LAB, Dublin with accompanying publication.

The piece takes the form of a theatrically devised sculptural film installation that contrives to articulate the gallery space as a hotly contested mutable territory, notionally shifting its fictive form and function to stage a wildly divergent sequence of monologue-driven scenarios. Delivered by a virtuoso solo performer (actor David Cann), multiple realities are verbally conjured and systematically dismantled at a dizzying rate of knots by an array of characters, yanking the viewer through one imaginative wormhole after another to slowly reveal the gaseous outline of an individual consciousness at the core. Projected onto a vast monolith screen structure, they appear one after another, like a re-tuning TV set, as a series of grotesque composite ‘faces’ splicing the actor’s monstrously enlarged isolated features into peculiar configurations. As the piece progresses, the pace of interruption and interjection proceeds at a hectic clip; two further audio channels relay auxiliary heckles, reaction and commentary from the other characters. The cast of clamouring voices begin to overlap, simultaneously mumbling, shrieking, weeping, barking and succumbing to apoplectic fits of hysterical laughter before resolving into a single voice singing Faron Young’s ‘Hello Walls’ arranged as a ballad with piano accompaniment.

The menacing claustrophobia of the isolated room as Harold Pinter’s recurring milieu of choice is a key reference point for the work. The populace of enigmatic invaders, manipulative schemers and hapless victims who collide and collude for control or dominance of space in his drama find a garbled echo in the perpetual imaginative reinvention of the gallery’s function proposed.