O V E R L I N E
Video projection and sculptural installation
Video projection and sculptural installation
O V E R L I N E & T H E E N D O F P R O G R E S S ?
Video installation and spoken word performance
2022
Video installation and spoken word performance
2022
Inter_Site at Queen’s Old Castle; Exploring duality in liminal space response by Lara Ní Curran
Inter_Site’s installation at Queen’s Old Castle utilises the fluid potentiality of liminal space and time to explore the multiplicity of contemporary urban experience, while offering some tentative avenues for change.
As evening pulls in, a small crowd gathers before an abandoned Argos in the centre of Cork city. Perched at an intersection, the site hums with multiple flows of urban energy as the city begins its shift from day to night. The May sun slips down the sky, and the air itself is cast a dusty blue. As the day’s heat is released from the concrete, the city gently hums. A stone bench before the shop holds a handful of spectators, more are scattered along the footpath…there is a gentle anticipation as we gather before the shop windows, peering into the depths of an unused space, waiting for it to shift, to become something else. As the city moves into that liminal space that is dusk, the shop windows burst into being with two projected video installations. There is something gratifying about having the eye drawn to a display window that isn’t trying to sell you anything. From behind the rolled down shutters, a sound piece begins to spill out into the street.
*
The window to the left shows video works by Padraic Barrett and Aoife Claffey, layered on top of one another. Barrett’s videos are short and visually potent explorations of the tension between the human form and its physical surroundings. In one the figure crawls through a heavy silt landscape, pushing and pulling himself through a meandering path. Each arm reaching forward reads as an attempt to connect, each leg pulled behind, as an attempt to escape. Above the figure is the unnerving presence of a drone, hovering, watching, not allowing the body any escape, any reprieve. In Barrett's work there is the sense of a frantic or desperate return to nature, but it is not a wholly satisfying return. This is no rural idyl - no romanticised vision of the benefits of “nature”, and seems, rather, to highlight the precarious position of the human form in today’s landscapes - be they urban, rural, or something in between.
Layered over Barrett’s work are Claffey’s striking shots of urban moments - street lights, cityscapes reflected in water, interior spaces - further solidifying the sense that human and urban may now be inextricably linked. Claffey’s sound piece emanates from behind the shop’s shuttered doorway. In this work, the rhythms of city life are composed into a sound piece which swells and recedes, pulling the body into the ebbs and flows of an urban space. Repeated sonic patterns build, echoing the industrial rhythms of techno, suggesting an inherent order and vitality. Feet begin to tap, passers-by seem momentarily transformed by the beat…but soon the rhythm fades again into a more murky hum of urbanity. The work continues to move between rhythm and reverb, creating a physical tension that feels fitting at this point of burgeoning night.
Kate McElroy’s videos run in the second window. The ever growing presence of glass and steel in contemporary Irish cities is interrogated here, in videos that at times layer these structures into shifting, self-referential grid systems, and at other times explore the world as reflected in their impenetrable facades. The videos are, in their own way, quite beautiful - hypnotic ruminations which, in purely formal terms are deeply satisfying. But in their beauty there is an intense sense of disconnect - the very cityscapes in which we live become little more than aesthetic experiences, denying any hope for embodied connection. As night settles fully in around the city, McElroy ducks down under the shutters, and performs a spoken word piece, her words calling eerily out, as though it were the building itself voicing a conflicted rumination on its own value. There is a satisfying conflict between form and content in this work. The disembodied voice maintains a steady, even tone that evokes the automaton, the synthesised. At the same time, Mcelroy speaks with an unnerving sincerity about the human being lost in contemporary urban structures, both physical and social.
*
The exhibition oscillates between condemnation and fascinated study, and in this way it elegantly captures the heterogeneity of contemporary urban existence. The works confound any hope for a clear binary, operating instead in liminality. The liminal is the moment between two states, where past, present, and future exist at once, and the multiplicity of the self is at its fullest. It is in these moments of uncertainty, of in-betweenness that we grow. In the ambivalence of liminality, we change who we are, shifting from one state to another. The liminal, then, is a space and time of great potentiality.(1)
By activating the abandoned Argos site in this way, Inter_site underline the potential of such in-between spaces for interrogation and exploration, and indeed liminality seems central to the work. Each piece operates from a space of uncertainty, where multiple meanings and realities are allowed to emerge and interact. The city scape is at once aestheticised and problematised; the human forms' place in both the natural world and the urban world is troubled; the vitality and the tension of our physical surroundings is held in equal measure.
The exhibition draws to a close around midnight, and we are suddenly untethered in the city centre on a Saturday night. In the front of my mind is the notion of a city “coming to life”, and I question the relationship between human and city. The streets hum as they carry a steady stream of people, and I wonder - do they bring life to the streets, or do the streets compel them to life? It seems, perhaps, that it’s both.
Exiting the liminal space of the exhibition, it is hard to say what change has occurred. Gaston Bachelard, writing on the metaphorics of space, tells us that “[s]pace that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space”(2). Perhaps in these works we can see an active seizing of urban space, and a drive to re-imagine, and reclaim our environments from indifference.
(1) For more on the idea of the liminal, see Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (1960), and Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process (1969).
(2) Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Boston, 1969 (Introduction).
This exhibition was shown as part of Stamp Empowering Cork Festival, supported by Sample studios, 28 & 29 April, 2022
Inter_Site’s installation at Queen’s Old Castle utilises the fluid potentiality of liminal space and time to explore the multiplicity of contemporary urban experience, while offering some tentative avenues for change.
As evening pulls in, a small crowd gathers before an abandoned Argos in the centre of Cork city. Perched at an intersection, the site hums with multiple flows of urban energy as the city begins its shift from day to night. The May sun slips down the sky, and the air itself is cast a dusty blue. As the day’s heat is released from the concrete, the city gently hums. A stone bench before the shop holds a handful of spectators, more are scattered along the footpath…there is a gentle anticipation as we gather before the shop windows, peering into the depths of an unused space, waiting for it to shift, to become something else. As the city moves into that liminal space that is dusk, the shop windows burst into being with two projected video installations. There is something gratifying about having the eye drawn to a display window that isn’t trying to sell you anything. From behind the rolled down shutters, a sound piece begins to spill out into the street.
*
The window to the left shows video works by Padraic Barrett and Aoife Claffey, layered on top of one another. Barrett’s videos are short and visually potent explorations of the tension between the human form and its physical surroundings. In one the figure crawls through a heavy silt landscape, pushing and pulling himself through a meandering path. Each arm reaching forward reads as an attempt to connect, each leg pulled behind, as an attempt to escape. Above the figure is the unnerving presence of a drone, hovering, watching, not allowing the body any escape, any reprieve. In Barrett's work there is the sense of a frantic or desperate return to nature, but it is not a wholly satisfying return. This is no rural idyl - no romanticised vision of the benefits of “nature”, and seems, rather, to highlight the precarious position of the human form in today’s landscapes - be they urban, rural, or something in between.
Layered over Barrett’s work are Claffey’s striking shots of urban moments - street lights, cityscapes reflected in water, interior spaces - further solidifying the sense that human and urban may now be inextricably linked. Claffey’s sound piece emanates from behind the shop’s shuttered doorway. In this work, the rhythms of city life are composed into a sound piece which swells and recedes, pulling the body into the ebbs and flows of an urban space. Repeated sonic patterns build, echoing the industrial rhythms of techno, suggesting an inherent order and vitality. Feet begin to tap, passers-by seem momentarily transformed by the beat…but soon the rhythm fades again into a more murky hum of urbanity. The work continues to move between rhythm and reverb, creating a physical tension that feels fitting at this point of burgeoning night.
Kate McElroy’s videos run in the second window. The ever growing presence of glass and steel in contemporary Irish cities is interrogated here, in videos that at times layer these structures into shifting, self-referential grid systems, and at other times explore the world as reflected in their impenetrable facades. The videos are, in their own way, quite beautiful - hypnotic ruminations which, in purely formal terms are deeply satisfying. But in their beauty there is an intense sense of disconnect - the very cityscapes in which we live become little more than aesthetic experiences, denying any hope for embodied connection. As night settles fully in around the city, McElroy ducks down under the shutters, and performs a spoken word piece, her words calling eerily out, as though it were the building itself voicing a conflicted rumination on its own value. There is a satisfying conflict between form and content in this work. The disembodied voice maintains a steady, even tone that evokes the automaton, the synthesised. At the same time, Mcelroy speaks with an unnerving sincerity about the human being lost in contemporary urban structures, both physical and social.
*
The exhibition oscillates between condemnation and fascinated study, and in this way it elegantly captures the heterogeneity of contemporary urban existence. The works confound any hope for a clear binary, operating instead in liminality. The liminal is the moment between two states, where past, present, and future exist at once, and the multiplicity of the self is at its fullest. It is in these moments of uncertainty, of in-betweenness that we grow. In the ambivalence of liminality, we change who we are, shifting from one state to another. The liminal, then, is a space and time of great potentiality.(1)
By activating the abandoned Argos site in this way, Inter_site underline the potential of such in-between spaces for interrogation and exploration, and indeed liminality seems central to the work. Each piece operates from a space of uncertainty, where multiple meanings and realities are allowed to emerge and interact. The city scape is at once aestheticised and problematised; the human forms' place in both the natural world and the urban world is troubled; the vitality and the tension of our physical surroundings is held in equal measure.
The exhibition draws to a close around midnight, and we are suddenly untethered in the city centre on a Saturday night. In the front of my mind is the notion of a city “coming to life”, and I question the relationship between human and city. The streets hum as they carry a steady stream of people, and I wonder - do they bring life to the streets, or do the streets compel them to life? It seems, perhaps, that it’s both.
Exiting the liminal space of the exhibition, it is hard to say what change has occurred. Gaston Bachelard, writing on the metaphorics of space, tells us that “[s]pace that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space”(2). Perhaps in these works we can see an active seizing of urban space, and a drive to re-imagine, and reclaim our environments from indifference.
(1) For more on the idea of the liminal, see Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (1960), and Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process (1969).
(2) Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Boston, 1969 (Introduction).
This exhibition was shown as part of Stamp Empowering Cork Festival, supported by Sample studios, 28 & 29 April, 2022