Bryony Dunne at the Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin

The trackmaker was a sluggish mover
Bryony Dunne

Irish Architectural Archive
45 Merrion Square, Dublin

Opening Thursday 15 January 2026, 6–8pm

16 January–27 March 2026
Tuesday to Friday, 10am–5pm

The Irish Architectural Archive and Askeaton Contemporary Arts are pleased to announce The trackmaker was a sluggish mover, a solo exhibition by Bryony Dunne. Spread throughout the ground floor galleries and inside the reading room of the IAA’s Merrion Square building, the exhibition is the culmination of the artist’s year-long research and production residency at the site.

The presentation centres on a series of footprints, still seen on Valentia Island in Kerry, of the first creature recorded to have walked on land. Dunne writes, “Impressed into soft silt at the edge of a swampy river almost 360 million years ago, they belong to a tetrapod – an amphibian ancestor that hauled itself from water onto land during the Devonian era. Described as a sluggish mover, this creature left behind what are now understood as the earliest traces of animal life crossing a threshold: a body learning how to inhabit and adapt to a different world on land.”

The motif of the tetrapod’s footprints begins a reframing of the IAA’s collection, asking fundamental questions about the genealogy of architectural form. Dunne’s playful ceramic sculptures intertwine with an artefact from University College Cork. They appear alongside an extensive selection of photographs and drawings from the archive’s own holdings, ranging from ancient stone monuments to urban developments such as the controversies of Dublin’s Wood Quay. In this endeavour, Dunne brings geological trace, archival image, and personal memory into dialogue, considering architecture as a place where deep time, lived experience, and material transformation meet. The Irish Architectural Archive celebrates its fiftieth anniversary in 2026, and holds the most significant body of historic Irish architectural drawings in the world, with a mission to collect and preserve material of every kind relating to the architecture of the entire island, making it freely available to the public. Since 2019, Askeaton Contemporary Arts have partnered with the IAA to create a bespoke artist-in-residence programme within this vast resource, and publicly present newly-commissioned artworks investigating the social and cultural context of the built environment, finding new possibilities to dwell in authentic and resilient ways.

The trackmaker was a sluggish mover is additionally made possible by the support of the Arts Council and School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University College Cork.

Working in film, sculpture and photography, Bryony Dunne has exhibited in museums, biennales and galleries globally, along with participation in numerous film festivals. She was previously resident at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht and in the European Ceramics Work Centre in the Netherlands. In 2026 her work is additionally presented at Paleis Het Loo in the Netherlands.

Image: In 1975, architectural student Helen Lane records on paper the medieval structures of Wood Quay, Dublin. Behind her, a construction excavator is clearing the land. Photo: Tom Lawlor / The Irish Times