Written and performed by Claire-Louise Bennett, with images by Claire-Louise Bennett and Mark Walsh.
On Friday, 2 May 2023, MoLI invited visitors to step behind the curtain and into the restless, illusory world of Claire-Louise Bennett’s Nightflowers, an immersive installation at MoLI created by the internationally acclaimed author of Pond and Checkout 19. Part noir-tinged memory palace, part luscious fever dream, Bennett’s text was performed movingly and intimately by the writer herself. Viewers could take a seat in the darkened, amniotic space, and let the words flow around them.
Journeying deep into a haunted interior, Bennett’s Nightflowers was buzzing with vivid, unforgettable images, colours and aromas: baroque tableaus of oranges rotting in the street or candlelit tables filled with resplendent dishes, as well as more mundane flashes of daily life: an irritatingly flimsy shower screen, or cardboard boxes overflowing with unwanted travel brochures.
Bennett’s new commission was especially poignant against a backdrop of the precarious and traumatic reality of housing in contemporary Ireland: the protagonist obsesses on having and not having a home, while gently mocking the conventions of domestic space, and how our lives and interactions are shaped by the four walls around us. Barely containing a lingering promise of violence and destruction, the nocturnal haze of Nightflowers sparkled with Bennett’s arrow-sharp prose.
Speaking at the launch, Simon O'Connor, founding Director of MoLI, said: "We are excited to collaborate with an international author of such standing as Claire-Louise Bennett, and her willingness to experiment with form is entirely sympathetic with our own approach as a literary institution. By commissioning a piece of writing that you can literally walk into, we hope this installation will attract new and existing readers into Claire-Louise’s singular world.”
Claire-Louise Bennett, author, and creator of the exhibition, spoke of her process: “In making this piece I was guided by the dimensions and atmosphere of the exhibition room at MoLI. I love this space. It's inherently dramatic, the high ceiling creates a plunging verticality that stirs up personal memories of places and scenes. Sometimes when I stand in it I feel ghostly. Rooms are private and contained, yet at the same time unstable and limitless. This piece explores that volatility, and creates an intimate space for the audience's own phantoms and secrets to enter and briefly unfurl.”
Claire-Louise Bennett is the author of Pond, Fish Out Of Water, and Checkout 19. Her fiction and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including the New Yorker, Harper's, The White Review, and frieze. Bennett grew up in Wiltshire and studied literature and drama at the University of Roehampton, before moving to Ireland where she worked in and studied theatre for several years. In 2013 she was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize and her debut book, Pond, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2016. Checkout 19 was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2021.
This exhibition was released with an accompanying booklet, containing the full text of the performance – it is available for purchasefrom the MoLI shop.
