An Irishwoman’s Diary: Wonder of Cosmic Dust – in Carlow

Dust. Our solar system is made of it, and so are we. Though it can be irritating – when it gets up your nose, for example, or congregates under the coffee table – it’s mostly unremarkable stuff.

But in the current group exhibition at Carlow’s Visual arts centre, this modest substance has gone cosmic.

The show, entitled Cosmic Dust, defines its subject as "tiny particles of solid material floating in the space between stars". The exhibition itself, meanwhile, might be said to duck and dive between the worlds of art, science and spirituality. It encourages viewers to look, think, sit for a while, and then look again – and all this in what is surely one of the most beautiful gallery spaces in the country.

As Ann Mulrooney, chief executive officer of Visual, explains, it’s part of the centre’s ongoing mission to interest as wide a range of people as possible.

“When you’re situated in a region that’s outside of major cities, it’s really important to reach out to an audience who may not have a huge interest in contemporary art – but who will have an interest in science, in astronomy, in geology, in all sorts of different activities,” she says.

This range is reflected in the exhibits themselves. From Ruth Lyons's graceful bowls – carved from industrially-mined rock salt from Co Antrim – to Rudolf Steiner's spacey blackboard drawings, sketched while he lectured on topics as diverse as yoga, Egyptian mummies and the practice of mashing up toads and feeding them to people who had contracted syphilis. Many of the pieces in Cosmic Dust are one thing, but also another thing.

Martin Healy's film Aether is an examination of the hunt for perpetual motion, but also a nod to the concept of "empty space". Brian King's witty little sculptures invoke ancient religions, but also futuristic sci-fi novels. Remco de Fouw's chalk circle offers 1,600-plus pieces of chalk, meticulously arranged by the artist. Except that it isn't.

Since the exhibition opened, gravity has been doing its quiet, unobtrusive work on the piece, fraying and blurring the edges.

Lyons’s bowls have an other-worldly glow, their translucence punctuated by large, highly visible crystals. Some look quite polished and finished; others have a more primeval, rough feel. The material from which they’re made couldn’t be more humble and grounded. But even here there’s a touch of magic, for the seam of salt in Co Antrim which gave birth to them runs all the way across Europe to Russia, getting whiter and whiter as it goes.

Upstairs in the gallery space Clare Langan's gorgeous three-screen film installation, Floating World, explores the not unrelated topic of how we engage with our own planet.

It’s not strictly part of the exhibition, but forms an extraordinary adjunct. Shot on Skellig Michael, in Dubai and the Caribbean island of Montserrat the work is, as Declan Long writes in his accompanying essay, “a troubled reflection on the present and future conditions of our own lived-in, worn-out world”.

The curator of Cosmic Dust, Emma-Lucy O'Brien, says the project has been years in the planning.

The concept was inspired partly by her reading of Thomas Browne's 1658 book The Garden of Cyrus, which has also influenced writers as diverse as James Joyce and WG Sebald; partly by the work of the French philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour, and partly by conversations with contributing artists.

One of the latter pointed O'Brien in the direction of a two-page essay, The Moon, by the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi.

“Written in 1958 at a time when it was becoming obvious that human beings would get to the moon, it argues that we have advanced so much in terms of science but we need to find our way back to a more poetic understanding of who we are,” O’Brien says.

Visitors to Cosmic Dust can peruse that essay, along with The Garden of Cyrus and the text of Rudolf Steiner's lectures. For those who want to get more physically hands-on, chunks of chalk – for drawing – and rock salt (for, ahem, licking) are provided.

This visitor refrained from licking the salt crystals – just about. But I found it difficult to articulate the effect the exhibition had on me, other than to say I was carried off into outer – or was it inner? – space. And that I hope to return before Cosmic Dust sails off into the past. One thing's for sure: I'll never think of dust in quite the same way again. Cosmic Dust is at Visual Carlow until May 17th; Floating World runs until May 3rd.