The trackmaker was a sluggish mover: a solo exhibition by Bryony Dunne

The Irish Architectural Archive and Askeaton Contemporary Arts are pleased to announce The trackmaker was a sluggish mover, a solo exhibition by Bryony Dunne. Spread throughout the ground floor galleries and inside the reading room of the IAA’s Merrion Square building, the exhibition is the culmination of the artist’s year-long research and production residency at the site.

The exhibition centres on a series of footprints, still seen on Valentia Island in Kerry, of the first creature recorded to have walked on land. Dunne writes, ‘Impressed into soft silt at the edge of a swampy river almost 360 million years ago, they belong to a tetrapod – an amphibian ancestor that hauled itself from water onto land during the Devonian era. Described as a sluggish mover, this creature left behind what are now understood as the earliest traces of animal life crossing a threshold: a body learning how to inhabit and adapt to a different world on land.’