A city-centre gallery hosts the subconscious of Richard Proffitt

There was a quiet rumbling sound in the exhibition space of the Kevin Kavanagh gallery on Chancery Lane in Dublin 8.

It wasn’t clear where it came from, or what genre it was. It rumbled like a gruff post-punk song from the late 1970s or early 80s, something lo-fi and abrasive, reminiscent of an early recording from a band like the Fall or Sonic Youth.

But it wasn’t either of them.

For a moment, it seemed as if the sound was floating over from the office in the next room, where someone had fixed a piece of paper to the wall, reading “turn on Richard’s TV”.

In fact, “Richard’s TV” was the source of the sound. It was a small grey JVC television that looked like it could withstand a lorry, and was sitting on the floor at the back of the exhibition space beside the office.

On top of the set was a Zippo lighter. On its glitching red screen was a face, crudely drawn in yellow, and the song was playing from the speakers on either side of it.

Although, it wasn’t one song, said the artist Richard Proffitt. “It’s two pieces of music combined.”

One was a tape loop of the 1965 single “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas and the Papas, he said. “There’s a distorted percussive rumble underneath that is from a piece of music I made eight years ago.”

When he’d rediscovered this old track, it hadn’t felt like his anymore, he says. “It felt like this found thing.”

Proffitt walked through the exhibition room. 

The walls were decorated with paintings – on canvas, and on newspaper. There were colourful abstracts, psychedelic skulls and the outlines of snakes.

He passed sculptures which echoed that sentiment of being found, which is at the heart of his latest show, Spent Dream of a Remote Wisdom.

One sculpture is of a small house. Hay spills out of the windows and a thin tree branch pokes out of its roof. It rests on a wooden platform propped up by a Kellogg's Frosties cereal box.

On the other side of the room is a scarecrow-type figure wearing a tattered Mickey Mouse t-shirt, made from more branches.

At its feet is a small box of cigarette butts, and inscribed on its side are the words “wish you were here”. Like the box of Frosties, it is stood on top of a Madonna cassette tape.

Sculpting through assemblies of objects is the main aspect of his practice, says Proffitt, and in a way, the music is no different. “It’s the same process as the sculptures. In a lot of ways, this is all assemblage.”

As the title of the show suggests, stepping into the gallery feels as if a visitor is entering Proffitt’s subconscious.

It holds his memories and dreams, brands of childhood foods, arcane objects from the recent past, like cassette tapes and TVs with cathode-ray tubes.

Familiar items are reassembled into unfamiliar forms. The icons are recognisable, he says. “But they are put together in a way that is not quite correct.”

Pushing his own limits

Proffitt stepped outside the Kevin Kavanagh gallery to smoke a rollie and gather his thoughts for a few moments on Wednesday afternoon.

He speaks slowly, and carefully in a Liverpool accent, which is where he was born.

Spent Dream of a Remote Wisdom is his fifth solo exhibition in the Kevin Kavanagh in the last 10 years. 

It continues themes that have fascinated him for his entire professional career, he says. “Time or memory. I guess the work in general is about those big themes.”

Around the room, there are 23 paintings, a majority of which were made in 2024 with acrylic paints on canvas. A small number he created back in 2021 on newsprint and oil.

He started to use acrylics during the pandemic, stuck at his home studio in Balbriggan, he says, for the same reason as many. “They don’t omit any odour and they’re water-based.”

Before he came to painting, sculpture and installations had dominated his practice, he said. “But over the last half a decade, a lot of my thinking is about how to combine those two things together.”

Using newsprint as a surface gave those older works that “found” quality that he likes to create, he says. “Somehow, I was able to rationalise in my brain that these were objects more than paintings.”

The paintings, in some respects, become extensions of 3D works too, with Proffitt using them to echo certain aspects of his sculptures. “I like having these visual links,” he says.

On the floor, a fake yellow snake slithers through a blue box, branded with the name “Angel Hearts”.

Those are little ornaments designed for graves, he says. “It was originally a box that had an angel in it holding a little ceramic heart.”

The snake sculpture on the ground is directly referenced on the acrylic and canvas works, depicting a yellow serpent slithering against a plain red background, or vice versa.

Another with yellow eggs in a blue nest, in blue branches, against a bright pink background echoes the blue house in the middle of the room.

Previously, the most straightforward part of creating an exhibition would be making the sculptures, he says. “It had almost become too easy to make.”

But, as he went deeper and deeper into painting, the reverse was almost the case for Spent Dream, he says. “My brain had almost changed in the way it was trained, because I had been making so many paintings.”

The interpretation of dreams

Proffitt says he doesn’t like to share too much on the intention of the work. 

But the title gives some of it away, he says. “It is to evoke this dream of escape from the kind of everyday pressures of existence in this world that we’ve made for ourselves.”

He sits on the floor in the exhibition room. “When I was making a lot of the sculptural works, there was this rumination on a dissonance of nostalgia,” he says.

He used images and icons from childhood, he says. “They play crucial roles in the development of our beings.”

A lot of the meaning comes from how objects interact. An ornament Christmas tree dangling from the scarecrow which dons the torn Mickey Mouse jumper can reflect on childlike innocence, as well as dwelling on the darker side of consumerist capitalism, he says.

The blue house was inspired by nativity barns, he says. “They are the ones you see in a shopping centre, or at the side of the road.”

Roadside shrines too, he says. “It adds a significantly darker element to the work.”

He dwells on the idea of life and death but isn’t always morose, he says. “I’m trying to find somewhere in between.”

Tying the room together is the large blanket which Proffitt hung on a long wire attached to two walls.

Draped over the knitted blanket was a web of string, bearing some similarities to a dreamcatcher.

But rather than beads or feathers for decorations, a large navy pendant with a daisy in its centre and an alien keyring were tied to the knotted strings and dangled over the blanket.

The blanket was made by hippies, he says. “I was interested in the idea of the comfort blanket. It’s called From One Cosmos to Another and it’s about this idea of travel, escape to another cosmos.”

In a written statement released before the show, Proffitt said talking about the exhibition always feels strange.  

“As so much depends on the relationships between the works, the space and the improvisational nature of my practice,” he wrote.

The way everything in the space interacts with everything else has such a musicality, says Eleanor McCaughey, who collaborated with Proffitt on a series of site-specific installations in East Wall during the pandemic. “It’s like he’s a musician.”

“The music is the feeling that you get when you walk into the exhibition, and the paintings are like the album artwork, and the sculptures are the live performance,” she says.