Social capital is a non-economic wealth that exists in the relations that people have with one and other. Lucite Fall examines the non-economic wealth that exists between people and geological ingredients. Coal Dust, Ground Barytes, Lithium Oxide and Concrete Powder play central roles in a fiction that sees them being collected, prepared and processed. The exhibition takes three parts: diorama, video and evidence. Lucite Fall presents a series of works that share a common interest in mining and labour. Film making techniques and physical diorama making are used to make fictions that illuminate the values we give to resources in flux.

Lucite Fall uses performative activities like driving, mining and building to investigate the social values that revolve around geological resource and unsettles our relationship to material by using manufacture as a form of empirical research and also a tool for myth making.

Lucite Fall is the moment when crystal and acrylic bind. It is also the name given to a remote outcrop overlooking the Opinnagau River. As a physical unification, Lucite Fall brings the hard and the plastic together. The firm is broken down and is surrounded by the malleable. This happens as cliffs slowly change shape, when jobs are lost, when paint is made. It is a process that sees the steadfast being chipped away at and its fragments gathered up and cast into a facsimile.

 However, there is a song to this brutal myth, a very slow rhythm that says “Yes. This is right”. A woman climbed up to Lucite Fall. Her hair was greasy, her fingers numb through wet gloves. She wore good boots and carried on her back a heavy bag of tools. As she climbed the cold rocks she scrutinized them, panting. Under her breath she murmured a steady song that told an old story. There is a song to this brutal myth, a very slow rhythm that says “Yes. This is right.”

Carl Giffney graduated from NCAD and IADT Dun Laoghaire, holding first class honours BA and MA degrees respectively. He has also studied in Slovenia. In 2007 Giffney co-founded The Good Hatchery, an artist led initiative based in Co. Offaly that he directs with Ruth Lyons and its members.