Y O U N G F O S S I L was commissioned as part of IMMA Outdoors 2021 by Rachael Gilbourne & Janice Hough and was designed to bring seating and convivial gathering structures to the grounds of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. Our projects often play to the inherent use value, aesthetics and evolution of the materials and environments they work with. Embodied in Y O U N G F O S S I L’s materiality and making-process is a prompt for wider discussions relating to the politics of housing, ecology, consumption and the environment. From the millions of years it takes for fossilisation to occur to the 50-year lifespan of modern dwellings, Forerunner’s work criticises notions of material permanence.

The collaborative practice Forerunner was founded by Tanad Aaron, Andreas Kindler von Knobloch and Tom Watt in 2016. With Y O U N G F O S S I L, the group expands beyond the founder members to feature artist additions to the seating structures by David Lunney, Liliane Puthod, Daniel Tuomey, Stéphane Béna Hanly, Fiona Gannon, and Matthew Lenkiewicz & Pauline Payen.

Y O U N G F O S S I L also functions as a modest domestic space, constructed when all the seating and gathering structures are assembled together, and as such it holds a promise of future potentiality or entwicklungsfähighkeit. Y O U N G F O S S I L is built with a visionary adaptability to our current condition.

This project is made possible with the support of the Public Service Innovation Fund. Presented with the kind support of OPW.