Would you pay £63 for a chicken? The artist who built a street to show house price madness

When Doug Fishbone came across an abandoned apartment complex in Cork, he decided to recreate it in a gallery - to highlight everything that's wrong with our property-fuelled financial system

A grim concrete wall greets visitors to the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork. It fills the full height of the space, hemmed in by a corrugated steel fence. You might think you'd walked into a room still under construction - until you notice the street lamp. It casts an eerie glow across the facades of stained render and broken windows that line the alleyway running through the middle of the space.

This is what US artist Doug Fishbone found when he travelled to Carrigtwohill, a small town to the east of Cork. Standing on the corner of a roundabout, sprouting from the unlikely context of green fields, was a half-finished apartment building, left derelict for a decade. Naked breeze block walls were punctuated with boarded-up windows, while a row of street lamps illuminated an empty road that led nowhere, petering out into nothing. It was a fragment of one of the few surviving ghost estates", the hundreds of unfinished housing projects that were left strewn across Ireland after the 2008 crash, when the property bubble burst.

It absolutely blew me away," says Fishbone. It looked so menacing and panopticon-like, with this curved blank wall on the corner topped with windows, but completely empty behind. It was just an abandoned facade, symbolising everything that is wrong with our property-fuelled banking system."

Please Gamble Responsibly is at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, until 29 August.