Space of Time Gallery is thrilled to present Irish artist Niamh O'Malley's inaugural exhibition in China. The solo exhibition, Interval, considers how materials, patterns and tempos shape our experience of spaces. Through carefully foiled and soldered glass panels, locally crafted wood and steel sculptures, and a moving image work that echoes the local landscape, O'Malley brings her signature mediums to the Beijing gallery to re-imagine a rhythmic and tangible realm in a site-responsive manner.

The exhibition proposes punctuation as a physical encounter. O'Malley's artworks make gaps, rhythms, and thresholds tangible—asking what it means to stand inside a pause, to notice how materials like glass can be looked at as well as through and how the rhythm of a building can offer a wonderful compositional prospect for an artist. "I've long been interested in surfaces that function as boundaries or barriers between one thing and another…The ability of glass to become a screen which distances or somehow re-surfaces the real and on which we can view or imagine the world is fascinating," O'Malley expressed in an early interview. The Shelf artworks use crafted wooden shelves and metal brackets to lightly hold textured shard glass panels. Their opacity and fragility challenge the viewer's focus and tension throughout their movement within the exhibition space. These senses echo the video installation Glasshouse (2014), a duo-channel video installation made in a private garden in Denmark. Two monitors show repeat a staggered tracking shot made from inside an old industrial greenhouse. There are moments of opacity and interior stillness and others where removed panes allow the outside landscape to come rushing in. ‘Glasshouse’ functions like an extended painterly composition looping through time. Critic Chris Fite-Wassilak reviewed: "that stereoscopic vision is itself an impossible return to life. That a return to outside might mean seeing things for what they are, a reality tinged and filtered through doubled layers of unreality." The moving images from a Danish landscape uncannily echo the agricultural setting of Space of Time Gallery—with its tunnels, rows of crops, and planted woodlands. The decision to present this video work was made by the artist after a walk in the village where the gallery is located. 

On the gallery's 5-metre-tall gable wall, the new site-responsive installation Interval (2026) articulates a modular system, part tool, part language. Consisting of eight three-dimensional wooden structures made locally from typical North China elmwood with a local carpenter's workshop, Interval is an installation resembling typographical characters and serves in part to bracket the space—to hold a 'pause' or a 'space' within their forms, and within the architecture itself. A bracket allows an interruption, a whisper within the density of a sentence, a page or a room.

A series of new Fold sculptures were produced during the artist's stay at the gallery. Using hot rolled industrial steel, the artist produces intimate deliberations on weight and gravity. Steel is structural and creates solid, load-bearing forms. It holds a fold, a curve, or an intense and reliable flatness when necessary. It is a paper-template now fixed and stable—a shape arrested and held. 

In a time of flux and fear, the harsh cut of metal, polished truth of wood and fragile but solid transparency of glass all seem like pertinent materials to gather in relation to each other and the viewer and the space. This exhibition invites us to move around the gallery, it presents simple materials scaled to the room and to our bodies – the exhibition as a physical encounter with a visual language.

This exhibition is generously supported by Culture Ireland.