Bryony Dunne’s new sculptures, collectively entitled Drifting, were realised during a residency at the European Ceramic Workcentre in The Netherlands. Emerging from Topographia Hibernica, an account of the plentiful flora, fauna and barbaric people of Ireland produced in the year 1188 soon after the Anglo-Norman invasion, a narrative begins to unravel.

With the medieval desire to explain everything as a unified system, descriptions in the book believed that the barnacle goose, a bird, was born from the goose barnacle, a crustacean. Both species have visual similarities – the mouth of the crustacean opening and closing, could be imagined as a bird’s beak looking for food. Dunne’s sculptures reimagine this correlation, while also transposing this story into a further appearance of goose barnacles. In 2015, thousands attached themselves onto Elon Musk’s failed Space X Falcon 9 rocket, as seen when it was recovered from the sea off Cornwall.

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