Lullaby constellation

Exhibition and residency, curated by Margot Heller Title of project: Lullaby Constellation The research developed from an artist’s residency in June 2010, which led to McCarthy’s site-specific Lullaby Constellation, reconfigured an illustration from Walter Benjamin’s Archive. The project was commissioned for the inaugural exhibition of the new South London Gallery and is now part of the gallery’s collection. Nothing is Forever is a survey of twenty artists whose practice primarily uses drawing including Yinka Shonibare, Fiona Banner, Paul Morrison and Lily Van der Stokker. McCarthy’s research explored images and texts in Walter Benjamin’s Archive (a dispersed collection of fragments, traces, and constructions). This work used a source image by Benjamin and re-situated it by drawing it on a bedroom wall at South London Gallery. The research focussed on ideas of legacy, forgery, and the archive, and examined the relations between autographic and mechanical replication. The ‘fixing’ of Benjamin’s notation was a way to question the idea that art works are to be appreciated primarily as a singular unrepeatable performance. The project evolved from on-going research using drawing as a tool to disassemble and study the visual aspects of texts, documents and books that exist in multiple applications and editions in order to reflect on their cultural transmission, developing as and from the following: Paradise 1968, chapter in Occursus (pub. Sheffield University), currently in press; a chapter in Transmission Annual. Hospitality (London: Artwords, 2010, ISBN 9781906441241), co-authored with Professor Tim Etchells (Lancaster University); Stealing Voices, a conference paper co-authored with Terry O’Connor (Theatre Studies, Sheffield University) in Hospitality: Transmission, 2010; ‘Your Space Flight is Leaving’, a text presented at a symposium at Site, Sheffield, in 2011, and published in Flights of Fancy Brutalist Architecture (ed. by Julie Westerman, Site Gallery, 2011, ISBN 9781899926183) Transmission Host: the friend, chapbook 2010, co-authored with Professor Tim Etchells (Lancaster University).