2no. Churches, A Diptych

2no. Churches, A Diptych - a collaboration with Faith in the Future for Architecture at the Edge 2024  - is a pair of works exploring the adaptive reuse of Ireland’s  ecclesiastical monuments. The church as a typology is as ubiquitous as it is enduring in Ireland. Every  settlement has at least one, with its the spire likely the crown of its skyline, and the nave the most generous room off its streets.

In the decline of their original use lies a powerful potential for revitalisation and reimagination. Taking two East Galway churches of St. John’s Church of Ireland, Ballinasloe and Holy Trinity Church, Aughrim as case studies, this diptych explores the gentle and ephemeral adaptation of these spaces through the use of inflatable architectures. Enjoying a short stint of popularity in the post-war decades, the buildup of these pneumatic architectures is skin deep, their structure derived purely of air. 

This strange lightness, insubstantiality, near non-existence, stands both in contrast to the heavy stone of the churches they fill, and in resonance with the incomprehensible ethereality of the beliefs these spaces were built to embody. Inflated within an inverted armature, they plastically distort the familiar elements found in these churches. An arch, a pew, an ope; stretched, impressed, bulged. Like a structure hidden behind scaffolding, these soft structures temporarily mask from within to form an open-ended array of potentials beyond those we have become familiar with in our towns’ religious rooms.

Two churches from neighbouring parishes are composed side by side, a pair of non-identical twins. Two salvaged frames, one from a Victorian Church , one from a Gothic Convent, are hinged, forming an asymmetrical Diptych. A singular amorphous balloon, moulding to the carcasses it inhabits, forms strange and alien spaces, and a sequence of cut drawings are composed as marginalia in the sky.