I am an Irish artist who draws attention to contemporary topics dealing with air, breath and atmospheric phenomena. Recent projects explore ways of listening to the earth and developing new ideas using the senses to relate to mycorrhizae and underground networks in the soil. I was fortunate to receive funding from the Ocean Memory Project in 2022. TO BECOME AN OCEAN is a project that seeks to sense the ocean in a region that is changing rapidly and which holds the memory of the climate in its ice and water between Arctic Greenland and Canada. I am working with Kate Stafford, the celebrated oceanographer, on this project to sense the ocean as a mythical place where some of the most important changes of our contemporary times are taking place. I participated on an expedition to explore the icebergs and the waters off west Greenland. The heart of this enquiry is an exploration of how the ocean holds the emotions of the landscape and the ice memory that is spilling into the waters of Davis Strait and Baffin Bay. Are they also flowing north to recall to the Arctic her ten thousand years of dust and oxygen and cold that have been memorialized in the Greenland Ice Cap? The project proposes to explore this changing acoustic and sensory environment through our senses. Greenland’s many stories are layered upon it and are held within the ice and water. Primarily we are exploring the atmospherically-driven winds and waves and the myriad sounds of ocean ice and animals with human-caused sounds like the noise from ships, barges, oil and gas extraction. Recently featured in The Guardian while traveling through the Greenland ocean.
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Siobhan McDonald
Siobhán McDonald is an Irish artist based in Dublin. In a practice that emphasises field work and collaboration she works with natural materials, withdrawing them from their cycles of generation, growth and decay. This process gives form to a range of projects which consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time. Her work with glaciers and other natural phenomena deploys a unique artistic language that gives form to intangible and richly varied processes including painting, drawing, film and sound.
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