Omitted Provisions
2025
Designed by Clare Bell
Production support: Nathan O'Donnell
Photography consultant: Bryan Meade
Printing: Print Media Services
Installation co-ordinator: Sonya Gildea
Installation technical team: Stéphane Béna Hanly, Natasha Duffy
Lighting: Conor Jacob
(Additional photography): Clare Bell, Lisa Sjukur
Categories: Printed Publication / Print / Editorial / Exhibition / Other
Industry: Cultural
Omitted Provisions is a print installation designed to accompany the collaborative publication, State, in Relation, and was on view at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios for the duration of Dublin Art Book Fair, 2025. This literature project was led by contributing writers Sonya Gildea and Susan Tomaselli with written pieces from Clare Bell, Oein DeBhairduin, Nithy Kasa, Nathan O’Donnell, and Annemarie Ní Churreáin. The installation is intended to be an extension of the publication, (launched during the book fair), which explored encounters with the state and lived experiences as they are shaped by legal realities in Ireland. It extended the book’s explorations across a series of expanded and enlarged pages, arranged as double-page spreads on across the building’s atrium.
Omitted Provisions borrows its title from a curiosity of Irish constitutional history. When the Constitution of Ireland was endorsed by referendum in 1937, certain legal structures had to be carried over from the Free State. A set of provisos was drawn up to allow the government to continue its work uninterrupted; these ‘transitory provisions’ were rendered obsolete almost immediately and have been omitted from printed versions of the Constitution since 1948.
The installation takes this idea as its point of departure, asking what else the Constitution might omit, exclude, or render unsayable. Using images sourced from the writers’ personal archives, Omitted Provisions furthers the intention of the publication, seeking to visually ground some of the many discourses and personal testimonies that remain marginalised, unacknowledged and unspoken in relation to the Constitution.
Members of the public who visited the exhibition were invited to take a poster each as a gift, to thank them for their engagement with the project.
This project was developed with creative support from Clíodhna Shaffrey and Órla Goodwin at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, and made possible by a Literature Project Award from the Arts Council of Ireland
Four posters, 470mm x 690, (two of 400 copies each and two of 800 copies), displayed on wooden plinths of the same size
Litho-printed, two colour Pantone 072U, Pantone 872U, 100 gsm
