Institution
Limerick School of Art and Design (LSAD)
Medium
Print
Graduation Year
Class of 2025
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'Ephemeral Table' - This work begins with fragility—of nature, of the self, and of the structures we build around both. Through a carefully composed meal and a series of objects, images, and gestures, the performance unfolds in constructed stillness, inviting the diner into a space where luxury and isolation are not opposites, but delicately and uncomfortably intertwined. Questioning what it means to perform luxury, and at what cost. It highlights the contradiction between ecological time—seasonal, slow, unruly—and capitalist time, which demands consistency, speed, and control. Within fine dining, food is no longer just sustenance; it becomes experience, commodity, symbol. The performance critiques this shift, not with loud rejection, but with quiet attention—to process, to material, to absence. In this silence, fragility becomes visible. At the centre of the experience is the apple blossom, a fleeting symbol of spring’s return—tender, easily bruised, and offered here as both ingredient and. Its ephemerality becomes a mirror for the fragility of the self, especially within the highly ritualised, pressurised space of fine dining, where perfection is expected and vulnerability has no visible place. The diner is guided in silence, instructed by embroidered menus, seated at a hand-carved table—a choreography of discipline and elegance that masks the human labour and ecological cycles beneath. Each element of the installation—etched prints pulled on handmade paper incorporating food waste, a fragile menu sewn by hand, vanitas-inspired still life photographs, a tree both blooming and gnarled—works to disrupt the illusion of ease. Fine dining’s minimalist elegance often hides its most pressing truths: the intense discipline behind the scenes, the invisible labor, the way absence itself becomes aestheticised. Here, isolation is not an accident of design—it is the design. The diner is alone, their plates identical to every other, their choice removed. In this tightly controlled environment, the line between care and control blurs. And yet, in holding that tension, the performance opens space for reflection. This is a silent revival—of appetite, of attention, of the delicate threads that tie body, environment, and ritual together.
