A Crack In The Mountain is an immersive group exhibition from Etaoin Melville, Tom Doig, Jack O’Flynn and Brian Leach.

Inspired by Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, each artist presents works that play with light, shadow, moving image and sound, exploring the nature of reality, otherworldly realms and sonic attunements.

Through a combination of video, light projection, stop-motion animation and sound, the space will transform into a world of shifting shadows, light, and projection.

The collaborative nature of this exhibition blends diverse artistic practices and perspectives, each opening a crack into the mountain, where stories and worlds are found in the light and shadow, in the echoes and whispers.

Etaoin Melville’s film and installation Stranger Whisperer is a work that explores the physical memory of the body.

Created during an artist residency in Skagaströnd, Iceland, the work emerged from spending time in nature, allowing all parts to fully land in this new environment. By feeling into the body, we begin to sense how some of these burdens may have been carried long before our own lifetime and were never ours to hold. Reflecting on the heart's memory, the resonance between nervous systems, and the unseen ways our individual lives shape the collective field. It investigates the contrast between the tension held within and the expansiveness of the natural environment.

Jack O’Flynn’s Black House Violet Sky is a stop-motion animation film created at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre. In a flickering and ever-changing world of ceramic, plaster, paper and paint, we find a humming and animate landscape where houses sprout roots and birds rise from below.

The film is haunted with an agitated grief, a sort of horror that appears in the desperate search for something to cling to. Feronia Wennborg’s soundscape permeates the world with sounds of scratching, squelching and spectral eeriness.

Tom Doig’s Allegory of the Cave is an evolving sculptural projection assemblage that utilises a variety of found and restored analogue projectors to create a sculptural montage of illuminated elements.

Borrowing its title from Plato’s allegory in The Republic, the work draws on the projection of shadows onto a cave wall as a metaphor for the relationship between perception and reality. Using paper fragments extracted from encyclopaedic and educational imagery, the work engages with shared visual systems that shape how we explain, categorise, and understand the universe.

Brian Leach’s Crack in the Mountain is an eighteen minute sound piece created in response to the visual work of the other three artists. It uses changing perspectives and a slower, geological, time scale. A fruitful unfurling is eventually revealed through the sense of searching and transformation common to the other works.

The music depicts:
shadows imitating reality;
light in the darkness;
a return to the womb; and
an invitation out into the world.

Thanks to:

Etaoin melville - words and sounds (from Stranger Whisper)
Hrönn Håkansson - Translation and voice (from Stranger Whisper)
Feronia Wennborg - Sound Composition and recording (from Black House Violet Sky)
Jack O'Flynn - Sounds Recording (From Black House Violet Sky)

Etaoin Melville is a visual artist born in Cork and a member of Sample Studios, Cork. Melville works across film, animation, drypoint printmaking, sculpture and painting. Culminating in installation presentation. In her artwork she explores her own interior landscape creating no line between her ersonal life and her artistic expression. Melville uses art as a means to process her experiences; believing that, at our core, we share similar emotional needs, and art provides a powerful platform to connect with people of all genders, ages, and races. Staying true to herself and her creative process is essential, as it allows for authenticity and deeper connections.

Melville studied Visual Art in DIT, Sherkin Island specialising in video and installation. Furthering her technical skills through studies in Film and TV production at St. John’s, Cork. Melville is an arts facilitator and leads workshops in community arts participation. Recent solo exhibitions include, Undercurrent, at Lavit Gallery, Ireland, where Melville gave an artist talk with renowned artist Aideen Barry as well as Working Artist Studios, Ballydehob and 8 Cows Gallery, Allihies in 2024. Her work has premiered at experimental film festivals, such as Cinesalon and Octopus Marque. Melville’s short film Silent Voices travelled to LOOP Festival in Barcelona, Damer House Gallery, and GOMA in Ireland.

Etaion Melville's Website

Jack O’Flynn is an Irish multi-disciplinary artist currently based in Bergen, Norway. O’Flynn works across sculpture, installation, drawing, and animation to create enveloping and intimate worlds of texture, form, image, and sound that explore themes of enchantment, ecology, and entropy. The embodied atmospheres of his exhibitions create spaces of mystery, chaos, and, at times, horror, at the nature of the world around us - at the unknown forces that propel change. Influenced by an intersection of ecological and mystical sources, his work forms a dream-like fable for a crumbling world, a portal to another way of being, and asks: Is it possible to find enchantment in collapse? 

O’Flynn graduated with an MFA from the Academy of Art, University of Bergen (KMD) in 2023. Recent solo and duo exhibitions include Somewhere A Bright Star Burns with Tamara Macarthur, at USF Verftet, The Archer never appeared again and the Dogs changed to moss at Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen, Norway (2023) and The Palace of Humming Trees at French Street Studios, Glasgow, Scotland (2021).

O’Flynn has taken part in residencies at Nordic Artist’s Centre, Uillinn: West Cork Art’s Centre and Scottish Sculpture Workshop. In 2025, O’Flynn received a 2-year working grant from the Norwegian Art’s Council.

Jack O'Flynn's Website