Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: Oliver Sears Gallery

In 2010 an exhibition known as ‘Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast’ showcased a new collection of works created by Patrick O’Reilly and was held in the Oliver Sears Gallery for the first time. This collection comprised exclusively of sculptural pieces and took its title from the famous passage featured in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’.

The works exhibited throughout this gallery demonstrated O’Reilly’s truly unusual versatility and inventiveness, as many pieces included were created in a multitude of media. The exhibition wonderfully demonstrated O’Reilly’s unique ability to touch material objects and for those objects to become his agents.

A keystone piece of this exhibition was the installation sculpture known as ‘Cathedral’, a twenty-five-foot tower made of tin cans. The sculpture itself consisted of between 4,000 and 5,000 aluminium cans which were specially made by Batchelors for this project. The inclusion of sculptures such as this reflects the fanciful and childlike elements of the exhibition title.