Mild steel, Quadraphonic sound 5 ' 50, looped
Working through sculpture, quadraphonic sound and experimental language, the work explores how the body is never just one, but always part of a multitude of open systems and how this interconnectedness is not something which is easily accommodated in the bounded language we have for bodies.
Drawing on Donna Haraway’s speculative fabulation as a method for thinking through connections between bodies at local and global scales, the lichen is employed as a speculative figure for imagining how the human, in this moment of biodiversity collapse and climate crisis, might be perceived from a non-human perspective. Through a fictional pluralogue, the protagonist grapples with communicating through the tight constraints of grammatical syntax, muses upon the entangled etymological roots that belie the clean abstraction of language and attempts to describe as they perceive it the warping contours of human body - as something simultaneously intracellular and global.
Through a process of steel bending and welding, four separate and individualised speaker stands were constructed that operate somewhere between the utilitarian and the creaturely. The stands function as connective threads between the world of the sound work and the world of the gallery.
The work was developed as part of the 2022 Landscape, Ecology & Environment Research (LEER) Residency programme at Leitrim Sculpture Centre.
Metal work completed with support from artist Noah Rose. Narration by Patricia Darling McQueen.
Photography by Kate Bowe O'Brien.
