Staring At A Painted Sky
Photographic Work (2021)
There are nocturnal visitors. The quiet unseen life of the world when the traffic has stopped and the planes are grounded. There is no more busyness now to distract the eye from noticing. If the night were only as full of sound and life as it once was. The forest, the bog, the marshlands and intermediary spaces. They say the wild things are returning, to overrun our cities. There aren’t very many left around here to overrun anything. So each night is a ritual of watching. Creeping about online, safari cams and satelites, imagining Africa behind the local hedgerows.
Corona, the radiance of the sun made visible only during a total eclipse. Time stands still just long enough to notice, to take stock. A young elephant in the pitiful cement enclosure of a Hungarian zoo, kicks its own waste to the side in quiet despair. A polar bear searches for escape. Inside high metal railings it smells the Alaskan tundra beyond, but surrounded by styrofoam litter, a rubber tyre and the manmade simulation of a cave it paces demented. A penguin sits catatonic, staring at a painted sky.
I turn the camera on myself, becoming animal, understanding what it means to live in a world restricted, confined, isolated, locked down. I wish I could believe we will be better, when this is all over. That nature will have time to rebalance the scales. Maybe it’s already decided, as we have become the new endangered species, in a zoo of our own making.
This body of work consists of a four-channel video for installation and a series of photographs, including images shot within the 2km lockdown radius of my home in county Clare, and footage gathered from a wide range of webcams, observed systematically over the first months of Lockdown during the Spring-Summer of (2020). They are a study of slow time, of biding time, of the strange atmosphere and growing sense of claustrophobic unease in the first stages of the Covid-19 Pandemic. The ritual of observing becomes a way of coping, a form of connection to a world beyond geographical limitations, but this too changes as day slips into night and regular routine gives way to a space of waking dream.
Photographic work from this series was published as part of PhotoIreland’s TLP Editions in December (2021). Available here.
Starfox (2021), from Staring At A Painted Sky included in Telegraph UK review , Irish Photos of The Year 2021.
The Library Projecty - TLP Editions
Staring At A Painted Sky published as part of TLP with PhotoIreland.
Staring At a Painted Sky
Four Channel Video Installation (2022)
Extracts from textual narratives appearing on Channels 1-4 (below), compiled into one video for ease of viewing here. The texts are projected as they appear (above), shown near to the corresponding footage.
Statement on Video Work (2022)
The work is composed of footage gathered during the Covid 19 lockdowns in Spring 2020. This began in Ireland on March 13th, with the closure of schools and colleges. Within a week on March 20th the country was in full lockdown with all restaurants, bars and non-essential business closed for a period of two weeks. By mid-April further restrictions were introduced, including prohibiting movement beyond a 2km of the home. It was the beginning of what would become a cycle of restrictions lasting over 18 months.
As a means to endure the isolation, I began a daily ritual of watching the world through a network of live online web cameras. Using this eye onto the world, I recorded hundreds of 3-min videos, tracking the increasingly uncanny emptiness of various cities and locations around the world. Three minutes is the average time it takes to drown. In the early days of the pandemic, infection with the virus was likened to ‘drowning on dry land’. In addition to gathering footage, I also kept daily tallies of numbers infected or dead, a reflection of the universal atmosphere of anxiety and obsession with rising numbers that prevailed at the time. Extracts of this log appear here with texts written in a style inspired by Georges Perec’s work ‘An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris’ (1974). In observing and listing the infra-ordinary, in a similar indexical matter of fact way, I attempted to contain the growing feeling of panic. It was a means to escape the very restricted world I existed in, like someone shipwrecked on a deserted island. After the first couple of weeks this process of recording and observing, shifted from one of natural curiosity in capturing the strangeness of the ‘new normal’ of the pandemic, to one reflecting more the psychological impact of prolonged isolation.The work is structured to reflect fourteen days. The footage however was gathered from March to May 2020. The piece would ideally be shown using video projection mapping, as a four channel video installation, using walls and screens.