Ali Farrelly a mean diameter — boardroomcommitteeroom

Artist studios and gallery
7 Water Row, Govan
Glasgow

About
Email
Instagram

Past Exhibitions
2026
Toby Messenger Systems in Collapse2025
Olivia Wiles West Side Story
Catriona Beckett The Guild of Abstraction and Image Making
Anna Lawrence Snail Trail
Sam Della-Valle Big Women Little Men
Ali Farrelly a mean diameter
2024Anna Metzger Teether
John Fletcher Acid Reflux
Scott Leeming Didn’t we have a good time?
Gabriella Day The best parts only
[Studio holders] MEETING 2
Amanda Seibæk & Zane Drees For Satin Bowerbirds
Kate Holford That unquestionable bloom
Amelia Barratt Cool Ground
2023
Anna Metzger, Maya Levy, Alfie Sellers The Ceiling So Far
Kirstie Lackie TV Dinners
[Group] A sense of urgency
[Studio holders] MEETING
Charlie Hodgson Trade Winds
Antonio Parker-Rees & Phoebe Kerr
Niall McCallum Path Users
[Group] World of Wonder
Orla Kane Star face
Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King in jest
Dora Padfield & Liv Fox and now the light is on it

Ali Farrelly a mean diameter

Home

14 - 17th March 2025

Ali Farrelly (b. Waterford, Ireland) is an artist living and working in Glasgow at Crownpoint Studios. A graduate of the Glasgow School of Art MFA (2023) and the National College of Art and Design Dublin (2019), Ali has participated in various residencies across Poland, Serbia, and Ireland, with an upcoming residency at The Scottish Sculpture Workshop in 2025. Currently, Ali is expanding her skill set by studying Welding and Metal Fabrication at an engineering school. This exhibition emerges from a personal struggle to reconcile the tension between engineering precision and artistic abstraction. At its core are two circles, spheres, and automated mechanical movement—typical of Ali’s persistent tendencies toward structure and spontaneity.

A Mean Diameter

“In 1991 cosmonaut Segei Krikalev was stranded aboard the low orbit space station Mir. As the Soviet Union collapsed, the country that sent him into space no longer existed. A pendulum clock could not oscillate in microgravity but in space Krikalev could play ping pong with water. Untethered in a free flowing laboratory, objects bobbed soundlessly as the real world’s centre of gravity inevitably changed below.

Ali’s sculptures have always felt weighted with their own moral calculus. They are not unburdened but grounded by a reality invisible to us. I think of a pained steel claw hand grasping and losing an arcade toy behind fingerprinted glass, mutely recoiling in its own diminishment. Exiled from their coordinates, these sculptures revert to compulsion and fluent repetition. Gradually the steel arm of the cardboard sculpture will rupture the skin it lives in. In analysis, the patient builds an armour of resistance to prevent the analyst from getting at the wound. We imagine that truth is somewhere buried behind deep grooves of accumulated patterns. There is no golf hole, tennis racket or objective in sight. Oblivion sounds misanthropic, like an astronaut expecting 16 mindless sunsets per day, but ‘Mean Diameter’ is hypnotically comforting. Are we all going around in circles or running on the metabolism of fate? ‘We all know too much almost right away’ writes Joy Williams, and maybe that’s the problem.”

- Emma Battlebury, artist and writer