Artwork: Plane No.7 and The Homeless Line, 2019
We live inside our economies, which makes them invisible to us.
They are only viewable with statistical graphs. But we live in a multi-dimensional landscape and these flat graphs speak more loudly to economists and to global capitalism than to our everyday.
Plane No.7 motions to this gap, referencing Ireland as the seventh nation to join the EU. It uses rhizomatic thinking to reconfigure EU data about the Irish cost of living between 1997 and 2019, resulting in a series of human sized flat-packed planes. It reimagines data about us as an object which requires no skill to put together.
Research paper about this work was published through Leuven University Press.
‘While the work does not overtly scream or protest, Plane No 7 slots perfectly into a veneered type of critique of capitalism, successfully playing with irony and projecting an awareness of the world in which it sits. The replicable and hypercommercial look of the work is a testament to Schmidke’s reflexivity and awareness of the systems that she inhabits. With an already rich body of work produced during her time at LSAD, Schmidke’s Plane No. 7 presented itself as the culmination of work by a motivated and concerned undergraduate, with an unusual sense of maturity and potential.’
- Gianna Tasha Tomasso for CIRCA Magazine
Dimensions: Dimensions variable (between 3m by 3 m to 5m by 5m depending on configuration)
Materials: Perspex
Shown at: LSAD 2019 Graduate Exhibition, Limerick, PARADOX, Riga, 2019, LSAD Graduate Award in Limerick City Gallery, 2020, GOMA, Waterford, 2020
This work is a part of the LCGA Permanent Collection.
Addressing Problems of our Capitalist Economies through Artistic Production
‘My artistic enquiries are driven by a desire to expose and understand the gap between financial capitalism and our everyday ‘lived’ economies. I make pieces by working through the many problems that arise from this gap, three of which informed the construction of the works Plane No.7 and The Homeless Line; the scale of our economies, statistics as a visualisation tool and how such data could become graspable.’
- Niamh Schmidtke, pp. 395 Machine Assemblages of Desire
Published through Leuven University Press.
Dimensions: 10cm X 10cm when folded
Materials: Digital Photo Paper
Shown at: LSAD Graduate Exhibition, Limerick, 2019, LCGA Graduate Award Exhibition, 2019, Orpheus Institute, Ghent, Belgium, 2019, GOMA, Waterford, Ireland, 2020
This work is a part of the LCGA Permanent Collection, and the OPW National Collection.