REVIEW
Kevin McLaughlin – Temple: from Build to Burn
The Social Studios and Gallery, Derry
IN MARCH a 72ft high wooden temple was constructed on a hill overlooking Derry, after its component parts were crafted and cut in a nearby warehouse. The project was a collaboration between Burning Man artist David Best and the creative company Artichoke, as well as a host of artists, crafts people, students, schoolchildren, and community groups.
The structure was opened to the public for a week before it was set alight on the evening of the Spring equinox, in a meeting of the the north's bonfire tradition and the temple tradition of the Burning Man Festival in Nevada. During that week thousands visited the site, and accepted the invitation to leave messages of peace and remembrance and personal significance. Names of departed loved ones, hopes, regrets, passions and prayers burned along with the temple itself on the night of March 21.
In this exhibition, Kevin McLaughlin, photographer and sculptor, charts the progress of the temple in photos and a 20-minute video, a permanent record of a structure that was never meant to last.
It’s a fascinating exhibition that mixes the strange and the ordinary. We see the warehouse scenes, where the thousands of parts were cut and catalogued as if for a giant Airfix kit. We see the temple built on site in Gobnascale, a weird, ornate, elaborate, oriental structure, overlooking a city on the western edge of Europe, set to burn like a Viking funeral or ancient, pagan offering. We see families and couples and solitary dog walkers wandering around this alien structure that has landed in their city.
The project was a celebration of possibilities and a joyous acceptance of a short-lived presence, and McLaughlin’s pictures capture this. There is real richness in the images. They show the power and majesty and vibrancy of the project, not just in the structure itself, but in the people who visited and the messages they left and the effect of the temple on them.
The best, to my mind, are those in colour, of the temple at night, glowing from within.
“It was a sacred space,” says McLaughlin. “A place of devotion, reflection, mourning, and celebration.” Those elements are in his photographs, spiritual, profound, and deeply human.
- Runs until August 1.
