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There are artists who spend their careers trying to make sense of the world. Peter D Cole has spent more than fifty years now quietly building one of his own.
Surrounded by his works, it quickly becomes apparent that the ordinary rules no longer apply. Lamps become sculptures. Sculptures behave like architecture. Paintings abandon the wall and wander into the centre of rooms. Trees interrupt perfect geometry. Colour somehow feels louder than colour should, and between all of this you will catch yourself smiling, though you may not be entirely sure why.
Perhaps that's because Peter has never been particularly interested in making objects as something much more ephemeral.
How does an idea exist in space?
For decades that question has quietly guided his practice. Sometimes the answer is a sculpture. Sometimes it's functional. Sometimes it's a painted construction balanced somewhere between a drawing and architectural plan. The medium has never really been the point. The conversation between them is.
This exhibition continues a line of enquiry Peter has pursued for his entire practice. One that draws equally from art history, architecture, design, structure and the physical act of making itself. The way an image is held, balanced or suspended in space is never incidental. It is the work.
Geometry has long been part of Peter's vocabulary, but never its conclusion. His precisely ordered forms are continually interrupted by something less obedient. A weathered branch. An unexpected colour. A playful gesture. Mathematical precision gives way to biomorphic intuition. Order happily makes room for chance.
That's what makes these works feel so alive.
Rather than a collection of individual objects, this exhibition feels like an ecosystem. Sculptures gather like old friends in conversation. Painted forms migrate from one work to another like recurring characters. Ideas appear, disappear and resurface in unexpected places. Every object seems to recognise the others.
What has always fascinated me about Peter's practice is that it never insists upon a single reading. There are no riddles demanding to be solved, no symbolism to decode before entry is granted. Instead, the works offer something increasingly rare: permission to remain curious.
Spend enough time with them and they begin to oscillate between sculpture, architecture, furniture, theatre, toys and monuments. Just as you've decided what one thing is, it quietly becomes something else.
Perhaps we've spent too much time asking objects to explain themselves. Is it art? Is it design?Is it sculpture?Is it furniture?
Peter has spent more than fifty years politely suggesting those are the least interesting questions wecould ask. Because perhaps the point was never deciding what these things are.
Perhaps the point is simply allowing them to be.
Surrounded by his works, it quickly becomes apparent that the ordinary rules no longer apply. Lamps become sculptures. Sculptures behave like architecture. Paintings abandon the wall and wander into the centre of rooms. Trees interrupt perfect geometry. Colour somehow feels louder than colour should, and between all of this you will catch yourself smiling, though you may not be entirely sure why.
Perhaps that's because Peter has never been particularly interested in making objects as something much more ephemeral.
How does an idea exist in space?
For decades that question has quietly guided his practice. Sometimes the answer is a sculpture. Sometimes it's functional. Sometimes it's a painted construction balanced somewhere between a drawing and architectural plan. The medium has never really been the point. The conversation between them is.
This exhibition continues a line of enquiry Peter has pursued for his entire practice. One that draws equally from art history, architecture, design, structure and the physical act of making itself. The way an image is held, balanced or suspended in space is never incidental. It is the work.
Geometry has long been part of Peter's vocabulary, but never its conclusion. His precisely ordered forms are continually interrupted by something less obedient. A weathered branch. An unexpected colour. A playful gesture. Mathematical precision gives way to biomorphic intuition. Order happily makes room for chance.
That's what makes these works feel so alive.
Rather than a collection of individual objects, this exhibition feels like an ecosystem. Sculptures gather like old friends in conversation. Painted forms migrate from one work to another like recurring characters. Ideas appear, disappear and resurface in unexpected places. Every object seems to recognise the others.
What has always fascinated me about Peter's practice is that it never insists upon a single reading. There are no riddles demanding to be solved, no symbolism to decode before entry is granted. Instead, the works offer something increasingly rare: permission to remain curious.
Spend enough time with them and they begin to oscillate between sculpture, architecture, furniture, theatre, toys and monuments. Just as you've decided what one thing is, it quietly becomes something else.
Perhaps we've spent too much time asking objects to explain themselves. Is it art? Is it design?Is it sculpture?Is it furniture?
Peter has spent more than fifty years politely suggesting those are the least interesting questions wecould ask. Because perhaps the point was never deciding what these things are.
Perhaps the point is simply allowing them to be.
COMING SOON COMING SOON COMING SOON COMING SOON COMING SOON COMING SOON COMING SOON COMING SOON COMING SOON COMING SOON COMING SOON COMING SOON COMING SOON COMING SOON COMING SOON COMING SOON
Billy Gibney’s new exhibition considers memory as something unstable: continually recalled, revised and reconstructed. The images, objects and faces we associate with particular moments can feel fixed, yet with every act of remembering they shift. Details disappear, others become exaggerated, and what remains becomes part record, part invention.
Developed over two years, this new body of work extends that instability into the physical construction of the paintings themselves. Volcanic rock, crushed glass, wax and marble dust accumulate across their surfaces, creating dense, uneven terrains that appear geological, scarred and excavated.
Fossils became an important point of reference for Gibney. As physical records of something that once existed, traces of bodies, behaviours and passages of time, they offered a way to consider how a painting might similarly preserve traces of memory. In these works, images are embedded into the stone-like surface as though partially preserved.
Faces and bodies emerge without ever fully resolving. Figures are cropped or obscured by shadow, producing the sensation of recognising something without being able to place it. Gibney is interested in this moment of almost-recognition: the way, as humans, we instinctively search for a face, and the unease that occurs when we can only partially find one. These figures become impressions, closer to the experience of trying to reconstruct someone in your mind and discovering that certain details are no longer available.
Elsewhere, heirlooms appear as recurring motifs. Long present within Gibney’s practice, these objects become vessels for the intangible things inherited between generations: memory, stories, trauma and history. Their apparent preciousness is complicated by their vulnerability. They tarnish, gather dust, acquire scratches and move from one set of hands to another, accumulating traces of the lives and events that surround them.
Gibney gathers his source imagery from an equally fragmented archive: his own photography, online auctions, old film stills, instructional manuals and historical archives. His process becomes one of excavation, interested in the moment of association when an image or object is stripped of its context and unexpectedly leads somewhere else entirely: to a person, a place, a feeling or a memory you may or may not have intended to revisit.
There is a fitting circularity to Gibney presenting this body of work at Oigåll. Before the gallery existed, before the building had a program or even a clear idea of what it might become, Billy was the first artist to place a work inside it.
Years later, he returns with an exhibition about what remains, what changes, and what we find when we return to something we thought we remembered.
Developed over two years, this new body of work extends that instability into the physical construction of the paintings themselves. Volcanic rock, crushed glass, wax and marble dust accumulate across their surfaces, creating dense, uneven terrains that appear geological, scarred and excavated.
Fossils became an important point of reference for Gibney. As physical records of something that once existed, traces of bodies, behaviours and passages of time, they offered a way to consider how a painting might similarly preserve traces of memory. In these works, images are embedded into the stone-like surface as though partially preserved.
Faces and bodies emerge without ever fully resolving. Figures are cropped or obscured by shadow, producing the sensation of recognising something without being able to place it. Gibney is interested in this moment of almost-recognition: the way, as humans, we instinctively search for a face, and the unease that occurs when we can only partially find one. These figures become impressions, closer to the experience of trying to reconstruct someone in your mind and discovering that certain details are no longer available.
Elsewhere, heirlooms appear as recurring motifs. Long present within Gibney’s practice, these objects become vessels for the intangible things inherited between generations: memory, stories, trauma and history. Their apparent preciousness is complicated by their vulnerability. They tarnish, gather dust, acquire scratches and move from one set of hands to another, accumulating traces of the lives and events that surround them.
Gibney gathers his source imagery from an equally fragmented archive: his own photography, online auctions, old film stills, instructional manuals and historical archives. His process becomes one of excavation, interested in the moment of association when an image or object is stripped of its context and unexpectedly leads somewhere else entirely: to a person, a place, a feeling or a memory you may or may not have intended to revisit.
There is a fitting circularity to Gibney presenting this body of work at Oigåll. Before the gallery existed, before the building had a program or even a clear idea of what it might become, Billy was the first artist to place a work inside it.
Years later, he returns with an exhibition about what remains, what changes, and what we find when we return to something we thought we remembered.