Coming up at West Cork Arts Centre in association with Skibbereen Arts Festival 2014

West Cork Arts Centre, in association with Skibbereen Arts Festival

is pleased to present:-

sight: sound: site

West Cork Arts Centre | Opening Friday 25 July | 6.00pm | Free

An exhibition of lens-based and sonic artworks responding to the West Cork landscape. The exhibition continues until Saturday 9 August and comprises:-

Topia is an interactive gestural instrument, in which its sonic content is derived from the soundscape of West Cork. Using manipulations of some of West Cork’s most impressive soundscapes, the participant has the ability to navigate a sound landscape developed as a result of the dynamic acoustic environment of the region. Skibbereen native Liam Cialis and Emmet O’Donnell, originally from Wicklow, are recent graduates of the University of Limerick. They will be performing with Topia at the opening of the exhibition.

Solargraphy is a lensless photographic process that allows for extremely long exposures. Each pinhole camera is exposed, in-situ, for a duration ranging from months to years, recording the transit of the sun from east to west. The exhibition includes a selection of solargraphic images created by Michael Stephens, who worked in collaboration with local artist Sheelagh Broderick as part of a larger project. Included are images shot on Sherkin Island and also a series created by installing pin-hole cameras in various positions facing the new West Cork Arts Centre site during the early days of the build. 

Materials is a film by David Ian Bickley, produced through a Project Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. Based on the idea of aspiritual line drawn across the Irish landscape, this piece mirrors a symbolic journey. Materials uses a number of cutting-edge cinematic techniques and devices to "play" with time and space, producing a powerful and emotive destabilising effect upon the viewer. The film is made up of seven segments, each backed by an evocative ambient score also produced by David in conjunction with a number of leading figures from the modern electronic music scene including producers Tom Green (The Orb, Another Fine Day) and Dare Mason (Noctorum). 

Bleak Paradise is a documentary film by Helen Selka which looks at Long Island, also known as Inis Fada, which is situated in Roaring Water Bay just off the south coast of Ireland, close to the town of Schull, West Cork. It is one of the seven  inhabited islands of West Cork. Many of the islanders are connected to a way of life that goes back centuries and Bleak Paradise looks at some of the day-to-day concerns, activities and memories of these individuals, most of whom were born there. Long Island contributes to West Cork’s rich cultural heritage, not only through these residents, but also through its returning holidaymakers who feel closely connected to the unique landscape and natural beauty of its situation.

Bleak Paradise was made with financial assistance from Cork County Council and Leader / Comhar na nOileán Teo

Fathom

Harvest Films | 2013 | 21 mins

“What did we do? Sometimes we’d sit. More times we’d sit and think.”

Dick O’Driscoll, Last Principal Keeper, Fastnet Lighthouse, 1982-1991

Fathom was filmed on the Fastnet Lighthouse in 2012. The film is an experimental documentary which blends original footage with archive film to create a meditative work on isolation and thinking and to invoke in the viewer the idea that we are, in an important sense, the places that we inhabit.

“My sense is that as we go forward into the so-called ‘information age’, paradoxically, we recognise less and less because we value experience less and less. By the time I was in my teens, I was aware that there was less silence in the world, less empty space. I developed a nostalgic yearning for those empty, silent spaces I had never experienced but which I knew existed.” Roni Horn, Contemporary Artists, 2000

The exhibition opens on Friday 25 July at 6.00pm with a performance by Liam Cialis and Emmet O'Donnell and continues until Saturday 9 August.

Monday to Saturday 10.00am to 5.00pm. Closed for lunch on Saturday from 1.00 to 2.00pm.