MEMORY PALACE

2021–ongoing

32 × 32 × 32 rooms. 32,768 days. One life.

Memory Palace is an ongoing collection of paintings, drawings and imagined rooms.

The work is organised as a three-dimensional grid of 32,768 rooms. Each room is a five-metre cube, assigned to a different day. Together, they form an architectural record of a life.

The idea began with a childhood memory on Achill Island. Over several days, we filled a hay barn with the summer harvest. Each evening, after working, I lay on the growing haystack. I was returning to the same room, but the space around me had changed a little each day.

Memory Palace returns to that experience.

I make small paintings in a recurring architectural space. An image, conversation, sensation or event from the day finds its way into the room. Sometimes the result is recognisable; sometimes it is abstract.

I think of each painting as an emotional after-image or patina of the day rather than a record of everything that happened.

The structure remains constant. What happens inside it changes.

Most of the rooms remain empty. Some belong to days before the project began; others are waiting for days still to come.

Individual paintings can exist independently and enter private collections, while retaining their coordinates within the larger work. A register will preserve their place in the Palace.

The project is also being developed through architectural models, sculpture and digital studies, exploring how the individual rooms might be experienced together.

Memory Palace is a continuing work, growing one room at a time.

Gary McGinty — Dublin and Achill Island, Ireland

For exhibition, collection or studio enquiries, please get in touch.