Hydrocarbons and Mark Beatty

Mark Beatty’s residency install (in its current state) at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, on until early June, looks at first like a children’s wellbeing zone designed by an exhausted council arts officer on mushrooms. Soft pastel geometry everywhere. Inflatable paddling pools glowing like toxic sweets. Cheap mirrors. Colour harmonies going on. Nice vibe but the thing starts smelling psychologically wrong. Tangled fishing net. Plastic hairballs. Crushed bottles. High-vis jackets issuing commands. Beach debris without the sentimental beach-clean moralism.

Thankfully Beatty avoids the standard contemporary-art move where rubbish gets arranged into something tasteful. This is still dirty, mass-produced, petroleum-soaked and damaged. It has not been purified into compliant eco-design. Unfashionable to say but plastic is both miracle and curse: disgusting, immortal, useful, seductive, everywhere. The ancients would have been amazed by the stuff. A Gentileschi or van Gogh likewise no doubt. So: like somebody smiling while wrecking your life. We got into a conversation about carbon footprints - there's an angry joke one on the wall at kick height - line-crossing, systems, fuel, consumption, the absurdity of art, and all the rest of it. Years ago a Chemical Engineering lecturer said something that never left me: plastic is surely a better use of precious oil derivatives that took many thousands of years to manifest than burning the stuff in the engines of cars.

Somewhere along the line I started rambling about carbohydrates and hydrocarbons: food and fuel, stomachs and engines, bodies and cars all basically running on controlled burning. Civilisation as a giant digestive tract with branding.

The experience in Mark’s studio never settles into becoming a message. It might be a play area, disaster zone, child's birthday party, a reference to environmental collapse, soft corporate branding exercise, or a nod to the human tendency for self-hatred. One vest reads: ‘IF YOU TOW THE LINE THEN YOU ARE REPLACEABLE’. Another: ‘CONVENIENCE OVER CONSCIENCE’. Subtle as a brick through a windscreen, maybe. Ambiguity about whether it should be toe or tow mind. Who does not toe the line somehow, or never embrace convenience? Go see this before it closes. Better still, go while Mark is in there. He is up for chat, disagreement, wandering associations and unfinished thoughts.