4 March 2026 – 31 March 2026
GAP Window is pleased to present its seventh exhibition, Protection Spell, opening on 4 March 2026. Continuing the project’s commitment to transforming public space into a site of reflection and dialogue, this exhibition brings together a growing body of sculptural works by Irish multimedia artist Eoin O’Dowd.
About the Exhibition
Protection Spell consists of approximately one hundred small metal votives made for intercession, healing, and protection. Each piece is created from sheet metal sourced from warehouses and building sites, materials drawn directly from working environments. Using an iron spike, O’Dowd hammers images into each plate, forming impressions through repetitive and laborious physical action.
The imagery depicted across the metal surfaces includes workplace injuries and physical maladies, alongside mundane yet valued objects. Together, these symbols create a tension between harm and care, vulnerability and resilience. Installed through hanging, the votives form a collective presence within the window space, evoking both devotional offerings and industrial remnants.
The work addresses the discrepancy between the labor required to sustain life and the spiritual and psychological damage produced by alienation within Labor and Capital relations. It reflects on the condition of working people whose physical and intellectual labor sustains the economy yet remains underappreciated and poorly compensated. The repetitive, physically demanding process of producing the votives becomes both method and message, echoing the cycles of labor it critiques.
Through these small yet potent objects, Protection Spell becomes an invocation. It asks what kind of society is perpetuated through exploitation of body and mind, and what forms of protection, healing, or collective reckoning might be necessary.
About the Artist
Eoin O’Dowd is an Irish multimedia artist from Dublin, currently based in Helsinki. Since relocating to Finland in 2020, O’Dowd has continued to develop a multidisciplinary practice spanning collage, moving image, sculpture, and live performance.
Violent experiences have informed much of the artist’s work, leading to a critical engagement with reactionary masculinity and an exploration of how cognition and perception can shift through physical change. Their practice often examines the relationship between the corporeal and the spiritual, informed by Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox backgrounds and an ongoing preoccupation with religious symbolism and historical materialism.
O’Dowd’s work combines material directness with conceptual rigor, confronting systems of power while drawing on the visual language of devotion and ritual.
In the GAP Window
Presented in the GAP Window at Malminkatu 5, Protection Spell places these metal votives within public view, inviting passersby to encounter a quiet yet urgent meditation on labor, injury, and collective psychic wounds. The exhibition continues to evolve, reflecting an ongoing process rather than a fixed conclusion.
GAP WINDOW is a window exhibition project initiated by Globe Art Point in 2021. The concept was created for the members of GAP Creatives Database with an aim to provide a unique opportunity to exhibit and/or experiment with their own artistic work and ideas.
Our window is visible from the street, you do not need a special access to see it.