Subject to Weathering, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, 2018
A screening of Irish Artists’ Moving Image work curated by Michelle Deignan in association with MEXIndex
samurai, Seamus Harahan 3 mins 40 secs, 2006
Wilderness, Clare Langan 7 minutes, 2010
Of oil and origin, Caroline Doolin, 19 mins 36 secs, 2015
Metronome, Cliona Harmey 2 mins, 1999
How We Float, Sarah Lincoln 7 minutes, 2014
with wind and white cloud, Dónal Ó’Céilleachair, 5 mins, 2006
Distance from Stone, Michelle Doyle, 9 mins 30 secs, 2018
Detroit Park, Julie Murray, 7 mins 33 secs, 2005
We experience time as a progression in one direction at a rate consistent with the rhythm of our bodies our consciousness and life span. This is human time, time that informs our experience of ourselves, others, spaces and places. In contrast the material of the earth is hard evidence of another time that is imperceptible to us, the achingly slow movement of deep geological time. This is earth time. The works in this screening recognise the dichotomy between human time and earth time. Flirting with the role of chronicler the artists all re-frame the material of the earth, exposing the substance of our interventions on the landscape and the images we make of them.
In Seamus Harahan’s ‘samurai’ we move at speed along a border’s hinterland held in rapt internal reflection framed by music and the passing landscape. Clare Langan’s ‘Wilderness’ exposes a stark and uncanny vision of landscape, one that suggests unknowable forces, events and times beyond our perception. ‘Of oil and origin’ by Caroline Doolin charts multiple territories and times in a quest to uncover the complex nature and value of oil and our fixation on it as raw material. The drive to create and maintain order in the natural world is also reflected in Cliona Harmey’s Metronome. Here a harbour populated with moored sailing boats is framed, looped and fixed to a regular and perpetual rhythm. Mediated encounters with sea, rock and the material of the earth inform Sarah Lincoln’s reflects on the relationship between us and the earth we inhabit in “how we float”. Dónal Ó’Céilleachair’s ‘with wind and white cloud’ is an experiential journey through urban and rural landscape through the eyes of the traveller and chronicler defying real time experience through speeded up film. Michelle Doyle’s ‘Distance from Stone’ focuses on the mystical and symbolic relationships devised using stone, the raw material of our forts, fortresses and follies. In Julie Murray’s ‘Detroit Park’, a monumental movie theatre, whose enclosed space was once a temple to compressed film time, now stands in ruins. The space is both a testament to the fickleness and speed of late capitalism and time’s relentless march towards disorder and decay.