Georgia Smedley
Catalogue essay for Ro Noonan Gutted
Gutted by Ro Noonan presents a series of sculptures grounded in process and architectural re-birthing; cathedrals of mutant body, each structure inscribed with spatial histories of the buildings they emerged from. Most of the eleven works in the exhibition began several years ago, some more than a decade past. Noonan works in cyclic rotations between forms, the passing of time inviting sedimentary build-up. The sculptures contain dormant works, consumed, refined, selected, harboured, a cyclical process of digesting and re-forming.
Their ‘completion’ is less about fixing forms, rather reaching a moment where the object and the artist reach a mutual pause. Noonan asks at each stage of the process When does a work begin, and how do we recognise its end?
Noonan’s studio operates like a library or archive of materials — debris from construction sites, fragments of other sculptures, and tactile offcuts are sorted, handled, and rotated. Some remains are so carefully selected and revered, they stand to be presented as works in their own right. Within this process, new materials from decimated buildings become a key that unlocks an older form and the works carry the residues of their own making. In this way, the works house a collective memory of buildings re-formed and rooms re-remembered.
Gutted furthers Noonan’s enquiry into material perception and architectural embodiment. His works explore how sculpture might retain the memory of their spatial and material origins. While the material sources are stripped of clear reference points, they remain legible as fragments of a room that a body once stood in. ‘Gutted’ refers both to the result of hollowing a structure’s interior, and to the visceral condition of emotional and bodily disassembly, Noonan invites a porous consideration between architectural and corporeal registers. The eleven works recall ruins eroding, leaning, hunching - ageing bodies never fully restored. The body is further invoked through language often used to describe the built environment: walls, passages, bones, grafting, lining, membrane, interior.
The interplay between material and perception is bound to a longer history of architectural thought; one that recognises space not as static but as lived and embodied (touched, heard and called upon). When reading Eyes of the Skin by Juhani Pallasmaa I was moved by his connection to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writing on hierarchies of perception and the experience of a work. The writer offers a resonant lens through which to consider Noonan’s process of material consideration and build — “My perception is [therefore] not a sum of visual, tactile and audible givens: I perceive in a total way with my whole being,” he writes. “I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once.” In Gutted, we encounter eleven forms that similarly defy sensorial hierarchy. Their architecture is not only to be seen, but felt (smelt/inhaled) through texture, scale, and proximity to the body, like that of a room.
The works do not arrive cleanly, like knotted scar tissue forming over time, they are fused, ruptured, reinforced. Gutted offers a deliberate return to the room and insists that sculpture, like architecture, is not just a container for experience but a counterpart in shaping it.