Vandals Get Arty
2012
48 paving bricks
Photograph
Gallery handout
48 bricks arranged in various sculptural forms obliquely reference an incident in the centre of a traffic roundabout in Wexford town on 1st March 2008, where a stack of paving bricks were covertly removed from the ground and neatly piled on top of each other on a Saturday night. The scene was photographed and appeared in the Irish Daily Mirror later that week, with an accompanying editorial endorsing it as an unusual and successful piece of public art.
The event, which went unnoticed in any local or national art criticism, marks a significant editorial shift in the Mirror’s stance on the use of bricks in art. In 1976 the paper famously led with the headline WHAT A LOAD OF RUBBISH, reacting angrily to the Tate purchasing Carl Andre’s brick sculpture Equivalent VIII for their collection.
