Stigma Damages is a solo exhibition by Michele Horrigan, known for her ongoing investigations into heavy industry in Ireland and the environmental impacts involved in the global production of aluminium. This is Horrigan’s most substantial presentation on the topic to date, with new video artworks, unearthed archival documents and found objects placed across five gallery spaces at The Model.
Horrigan grew up and today lives beside Ireland’s largest industrial complex, the Rusal Aughinish alumina refinery on the Shannon Estuary. There, mineral ore bauxite is imported from Guinea in Africa and chemically altered onsite to become aluminium, used in computer parts and engines, drink cans, cars and airplanes, or kept as a commodity in warehouses across the world to be traded on stock exchanges. Attracted by foreign investment policies and the lax environmental protection regimes of Ireland in the 1970s, the refinery’s construction created the largest building site in Europe by the banks of the Shannon. Commencement of production saw it lauded as a key success of the Irish state’s economic policy to attract multinational companies and corporate interests to Irish shores. Horrigan’s exhibition focuses on the continuing legacy of operations onsite today – throughout her life she has borne witness to debates in its hinterlands linking the refinery to deformed agricultural livestock, local health issues, and toxic deposits.
The title of the exhibition, Stigma Damages – typically used as a legal term to describe suspected environmental contamination – additionally acts for Horrigan as a framework to map and uncover corporate greenwashing strategies of global extraction industries, and seek restorative justice for land and its people. At Aughinish, an aging industrial complex releases over 1 million tonnes of carbon each year. Its owners, Moscow-based Rusal seek to expand existing toxic ‘red mud’ waste dumps around the refinery in size. Since early 2022, with war in Ukraine, the Irish government refuse to apply sanctions despite proven links to military forces through its main shareholder. Horrigan notes that Stigma Damages has over time become an ongoing platform to spotlight these harsh realities, ‘driven in the belief that profound violations of environments and civil rights will be left disavowed and unrecoverable, from the contamination of ecosystems to exploitation and expulsion of humans.’
Videos at The Model feature a detailed overview of the Rusal refinery and often-turbulent public meetings in nearby Askeaton around its future. Further fieldwork by the artist around environmental activism and knowledge-sharing is seen, as with Horrigan’s work with community organisations in Western Australia that successfully challenge the corporate mandates of alumina refineries outside Perth. Topographical maps, the artists’ own health tests and a curated selection of objects and documents amassed over fifteen years of research are additionally presented.
The exhibition marks the beginning of a series of further developments in Horrigan’s artwork. A new resource website launches at www.stigmadamages.com, featuring key research, critical texts and a podcast series to unfold over the next year. A seminar event on Saturday October 12 will feature the artist in conversation with Neal White (Artist and Professor of Art at University of Westminster, London) Patrick Bresnihan (Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Maynooth University) and Emanuela Ferrari (Environmental Campaigner with FutureProof Clare and PhD candidate at University College Dublin).
Stigma Damages is additionally funded by the Arts Council Project Award and supported by Eco Showboat, Community Alliance for Positive Solutions (Western Australia) and Peel Environmental Protection Alliance (Western Australia).
The exhibition will continue until Saturday, 23rd November 2024 at The Model. All openings and exhibitions at The Model are free and open to the public.
