A Multisensory Soundscape Event
During their residency at the Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Tara Baoth Mooney, Rian Trench and Diarmuid MacDiarmada collaborated with the physical environment of the building for over 8 weeks, culminating in this soundscape event. The trio made field recordings around the Glens and LSC, capturing human and non-human acoustic elements from within the buildings themselves. These recordings form the starting point for an extended sonic poem, in which the more elusive qualities of architecture have been drawn into a synaesthetic environment. The sounds of artists at work, intermixed with the sounds of the building itself, speak of place and of process: a locus of etheric resonance, memory, and kinship.
Their explorations culminate in this soundscape, which is one element of a multi-sensory immersive installation. Field recordings and artist-generated audio are merged with olfactory, gustatory, visual, and tactile elements and housed in a large octagonal architectural dome constructed within the main gallery. The ecosystem of the building has been extended by the introduction of organic material, a number of guest artists and non-human elements ‘bringing the outside in’ to share the space and to ‘play the building’. Local plant materials infuse the neutral world of the gallery space with the chaotic richness of the outside world, to bear witness, to absorb resonance, and to conjure a more-than-human multi-sensory entity that is both affective and interactive. To quote Avery Gordon on hauntology, the work aspires “[to put] life back in where only a vague memory or a memory or a bare trace was visible to those who bothered to look.”
By recovering the soundscape of the building and its occupants and intermixing it with new and alternative multisensory resonances emanating from deep engagement, this project is about (to borrow again from Gordon), “striving to understand the conditions under which a memory was produced in the first place toward a counter-memory, for the future.”
Tara Baoth Mooney is an interdisciplinary artist whose work encompasses sound, performance, textiles, drawing, and video. Tara’s work is often site-specific and responds to events past and present which explore lived experience and the inter-relationship of people and practice, daily ritual and objects within their respective ecologies. The work oscillates between historical foundations of meaning making in context, current social constructive elements where self and meaning sit in context, and the interruption of self, the unmaking of meaning through destruction of context.
She works in collaboration with The Clumsy Giantess, a shadow persona that enables her to engage with her art practice in a unique way and offers new perspectives with which to engage with the world around her. Tara is a studio holder at the Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Manorhamilton Co. Leitrim.
Mooney has just completed an art-based research PhD which focused on the relationship between people, lived experience and garments within an ecopsychosocial framework. Her work has brought her from the Jim Henson Studio in New York, to the heart of fashion and textiles in China, Bangladesh and India. Along with the Creative Exchange Residency at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, she has been artist in residence in Banglanatak, Kolkata. Prabartana, Dhaka. UAL, SMARTlab at UCD, The Hawkswell, Sligo.
Rian Trench is a film-maker and multi-instrumentalist with experience of playing in many different musical ensembles. He has made several live music videos as part of the Deaf Brothers Production team based in Wicklow. Rian has created conceptual video pieces one of which was commissioned by experimental Irish band Alarmist for their song "Life In Half Time" which explores themes of abuse cycles and self-destruction. Trench composes for film and video, and records original pieces and scores for orchestrations. He produces musical works for various artists and has a diverse knowledge of sound recording and track mixing.
Diarmuid MacDiarmada (b. 1972) discovered a passion for drawing and for music before he hit his teens in suburban Dublin. He escaped the perils of a formal art education in 1991 and embarked on a journey in music that saw him performing in situations from pubs and clubs to the streets of many international cities, to forests, prison waiting-rooms, and mental institutions, in some of the great venues of the world and on national TV and radio, to name a few. Various adventures in remedial music work, event-management and set-design, and soundtrack work for theatre further informed his practice.
Curated by Sean O'Reilly