A cobalt sea and above it a cobalt sky

The Transformation Gallery Arch 18 Valentia Place, London, SW9 8PJ

Drawing on his long-standing interest in the symbolic apparatus of state power and the

semiotics of ceremony, Ivers turns his attention to the 1932 Eucharistic Congress in Dublin—a

moment when the Irish Free State staged itself on a global platform. With an eye attuned to

irony and spectacle, he excavates fragments of mediated memory, juxtaposing archival material

with contemporary visual languages to reframe the political theatre of the past.

Taking its name from a newspaper description of the sea and sky as the Papal Legate

approached Dun Laoghaire aboard the SS Cambria—flanked by Irish Free State Army planes in

the shape of a cross—a cobalt sea and above it a cobalt sky reads like a scene storyboarded for

a nationalist epic. Instead, Ivers oRers us a coolly detached, visually seductive counter-

narrative, one that interrogates the aesthetics of belief and the manufactured sublime.

In the spirit of his earlier projects, which spliced Cold War paranoia with pulp culture, here too

the theatrical cohabits with the bureaucratic. Expect monochrome prints, military formations,

coded gestures, commemorative ephemera: a visual essay in command and control.

This is not history painting, nor simply a meditation on nostalgia. It is closer to cultural

forensics—an artist's attempt to prise apart the scaRolding of memory from the spectacle of

myth. In Ivers' world, iconography is never innocent.