O’Malley’s sculptural installations incorporate a delicate balance of space and object, her artwork punctuating the room with its distinctive vocabulary of steel, limestone, wood and glass. Responding thoughtfully to the dimensions and history of the gallery space, O’Malley’s sculptural works coalesce in a purposeful landscape of forms, acknowledging their location in her first ever US exhibition in the vibrant hum of New York City, while considering the influence of O’Malley’s upbringing on the west coast of Ireland. Featuring a number of new works created for the exhibition, Lightbox represents a new chapter developing on the ideas in Gather – examining the familiarity of static forms and how people build relationships to them, and finding the pathos of inanimate urban objects such as the titular lightbox of the show, dimmed and containing the bones of display while capturing the passerby in its smoky reflection. The exhibition brings together sculptural works constructed out of familiar components, such as wood and stone, repurposed and displayed to underscore their materiality. O’Malley recontextualizes overlooked objects from domestic windows to pavement grates, interrogates their life in an urban context, and utilizes the innate solid fragility of glass to create delicate compositions that are poised on the verge of collapse and destruction. 

O’Malley’s recent work considers the materiality of the urban environment in particular. As she navigated the city during Covid the artist found herself more conscious of the materials and mechanisms which support and shape our lives - from drains to vents. Lightbox (2023) examines both the intention of the object to expose and to lure, and its capacity to contain energy and potential in its own materiality – the function of the lightbox shifts to reflect and diffuse the world around it in its surface.