Ruth Niamh Clinton Moriarty

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts (November 2024)

Art X Residency:

Virginia Tech New Music + Technology Festival (October 2024)

Solas Nua, offsite exhibition and performance, Washington D.C. (September 2024)

University of Galway Centre for Creative Technologies, Masterclass (TBA 2025)

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Touring Pamphlet

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A Collection of Disarticulated Bones is a new body of video work, photographs and objects made and combined for TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, curated by Michele Horrigan. The exhibition takes place, as part of the city-wide festival, at Galway City Museum, and will run to December 31. The project also toured to Solas Nua, Washington D.C. and The New Music + Technology Festival at the Moss Arts Centre at Virginia Technical University in 2024.

A Collection of Disarticulated Bones traverses centres of knowledge in the US, UK and Europe in order to unpick different foundation myths of the Global North: institutional, pop cultural and embodied. This long-term project examines how decisions relating to preservation and presentation of histories can shape national and individual identities, in the context of imperialism, late capitalism, rising ethnonationalism and polarised public debate on both sides of the Atlantic.

Three short films feature speakers from the north and west of Ireland, all sharing stories of community action, united vision and the struggle to authentically remember and commemorate collective trauma.

Image 1: ‘Forty-Five Seconds’ reflects on how stories are told and the impact of American culture on the popular imagination in Ireland. Touching on tourism, alien invasion, bird migration and military aviation, the film, which follows a 1993 apparition in the night’s sky above west Limerick, hints towards the fear subconsciously felt by some in the Global North that a technologically advanced alien society could come and steal land and resources, mimicking historical colonial expansion.

Image 2: ‘Brick by Brick’ concerns a historic Tennessee home that was transported to the Ulster American Folk Park in Fermanagh: a large red brick house built in 1825 by Francis Rogan, an Irish American Catholic plantation owner and enslaver. As told to us by Curator of Emigration at NMNI, Liam Corry.

Image 3: ‘Stone by Stone II’ is a new video-loop, made guerrilla-style at the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park, NYC, to accompany Brick-by-Brick.

Images 4 & 5: ‘Part of the People’ is the story, as told by Marie Coyne, of 13 human skulls that were stolen from the island of Inishbofin in 1890. Trinity College researchers engaged in the discredited Victorian practice of craniometry, or skull-measuring, gave these human remains to the ‘Old Anatomy’ department, where they remained for 133 years. After a long campaign by islanders, the skulls were returned and interred in 2023, potentially setting a precedent for the return of other controversial artefacts from museum collections.

Images 6 & 7: Installation photographs from TULCA Festival of Visual Art at Galway City Museum by Ros Kavanagh.

Image 8: John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, visit to Ireland (1963), commemorative linen cloth, courtesy of the Galway City Museum Collection.

Image 9 & 10: TULCA presentation at Galway City Museum; including 3D printed bricks made in cooperation with National Museums NI and Galway University.

Images 11 & 12: ‘A Collection of Disarticulated Bones’ is a disposable camera photo series starting in 2023, that draws together places, stories and objects that all contain overlapping themes of settler colonialism, national identity, tourism and power struggles.

- Rogan House, Ulster American Folk Park, Omagh, 2024

- Christopher Columbus step, Plaça del Rei, Barcelona, 2023

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A Collection of Disarticulated Bones - US Tour:

Image 16: ‘A Collection of Disarticulated Bones’ installation with Solas Nua, offsite at the Mad Hatter Bar, Washington D.C. (September 2024).

Image 17: Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty in conversation with Dr. Ben Knapp at Virginia Tech Institute for Creativity and Technology (October 2024).

Image 18: Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty perform ‘I don’t believe in “isms”, I just believe in me’ at The Cube, Moss Arts Centre (October 2024).

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Our research in 2023-24 has been supported by Askeaton Contemporary Arts, the Centre for Creative Technologies at University of Galway, Galway Culture Company, The Ulster American Folk Park and National Museums Northern Ireland, Project Arts Centre, Creative Heartlands, Galway City Museum and the Arts Council of Ireland.

exhibition curated by Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty

The Model, Sligo

2023

cover image: poster featuring Kent Monkman, ‘Sisters & Brothers’, 2015, still image. Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada.

exhibition catalogue

review by Ingrid Lyons

KEVIN JEROME EVERSON / GRACE HENRY / PAUL HENRY / SEAN KEATING / MAURICE MACGONIGAL / EMILY MCFARLAND / KENT MONKMAN / WILLIAM ORPEN / NANO REID / GEORGE WILLIAM RUSSELL / TUQA AL SARRAJ / STEVEN YAZZIE / JACK B. YEATS

Taking the modern Irish painting canon as a popular imaginary for a rapidly changing new republic, Last of the Visioners considers how early 20th century representations of Ireland have come to shape our national and diasporic consciousness. Here, key romantic works by artists who were active during Ireland's revolutionary period, and formative early years of the Free State, are exhibited against contemporary works made in North America and Ireland. Documentary-style media by artists Kevin Jerome Everson, Emily McFarland, Tuqa Al-Sarraj, Kent Monkman and Steven Yazzie will commune with the visionary paintings of, among others, Sean Keating, Paul Henry, George William Russell and Jack B. Yeats.

Last of the Visioners presents these selected paintings from The Niland Collection as a 'promise' to a burgeoning nation, and gives prominence to more recent depictions of the ecological realities, partisan violence and enduring colonial gaze that have affected western landscapes in the ensuing years. Displayed through a nonchronological framework, works from the past two decades will give a sense of the present intruding upon and informing the past, including a range of alternative perspectives to unsettle the bucolic visions of yesterday. This exhibition hopes to tell a story of the Irish that acknowledges our struggles, admits our complicities and builds our capacity for solidarity.

Kindly supported by The Arts Council of Ireland; The Model Sligo, Home of The Niland Collection; Limerick City Gallery of Art; The Ulster American Folk Park (National Museums NI); The British Geological Survey; Sligo County Council; Fingal County Council, and the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.

Exhibition photographs by Maja Moser.

Last of the Visioners was featured in Mirror Lamp Press, with an original essay commission, as well as in the Sligo Champion and Leitrim Observer (09/23).

exhibition and performance

Hyde Bridge Gallery, Sligo

as part of Sligo Cairde Arts Festival - 2022

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performance

Askeaton Contemporary Art

Welcome to the Neighbourhood - 2022

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accompanying pamphlet

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'In a Contrary Place' is a short film that explores the impact of colonisation and American culture on Irish national identity. Through this work, we are pursuing an ongoing inquiry into the construction of official and folk records, and how these can contribute to a collective sense of possibility or paralysis.

Here, scenes from the rural west of Ireland that have an affinity with the US follow a defunct train-line, from tourist sites to peat fields; a transatlantic airport to a basilica. A voiceover performed by Méabh Meir recounts the Voyage of Máel Dúin, a traditional imram or ‘hero’s journey’ that visits such places as the island of the ‘revolving beast’ (that twists horribly, contorting its bones inside its skin) and the island of lamenting men, where crewmembers who step ashore become mired in their own wailing sorrows.

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Starting in 2019, we have been experimenting with constructing an alternative narrative identity for Ireland. 'I don't believe in "isms", I just believe in me', is a 'directors' commentary' performance delivered alongside 'In a Contrary Place', detailing our own stories of complacency and complicity in relation to the Irish State and America, ending in a karaoke-style rendition of an original song that follows an absurd epic journey.

Together these works comprise a series of cautionary tales set against the dominant myths we are led to believe about ourselves and our homeland.

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Works (left):

In a Contrary Place (2022), 27’33’’ HD video excerpts and stills

Last of the Visioners (2018-2021), AV room

I don’t believe in ‘isms’ I just believe in me (2022) performance at the Top of the Town pub, Askeaton Contemporary Arts’ Welcome to the Neighbourhood programme and the Yeats Society building, Sligo Cairde Arts Festival. Later touring to Solas Nua, Washington D.C. and Virginia Tech New Music + Arts Festival at the Moss Arts Centre, Blacksburg, (both 2024).

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Press for ‘In a Contrary Place’

Adrian Duncan ‘Best Art Books of the Year 2022’ The Irish Times, 26.11.22

Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty ‘In a Contrary Place’, Visual Artists’ News Sheet, Sept-Oct 2022

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This project was supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and Fingal County Council.

residency and exhibition at the Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, Co. Cork

2016

curated by Miranda Driscoll

- Info Sheet

- Poster 1 / Poster 2

press release:

This year marks 100 years since Britain, and therefore Ireland, adopted Daylight Savings Time. The rearrangement of public timekeeping resulted in a sudden loss of twenty-five minutes and twenty-one seconds of Irish time. Taking this temporal elision as a starting point, Time (Ireland) Act tests the possibility of unfolding infinite moments of unrealised potential into the dramatic setting of Cobh.

Collaborative gestures, video and interactive fiction are used to present simultaneous, non-linear narratives of remote (mis)communication and to question the possibility of ownership over intangible forces. Whilst being influenced by the experience of undertaking a year-long residency in Cobh, Clinton and Moriarty look outward to create a temporary confluence of knowledges: distant and proximate.

Works in order of location:

- Cryptesthesia

interactive text adventure game

Cryptesthesia screensaver

'Cryptesthesia' is another word for paranormal perception or clairvoyance. It is also a play on words in this case, referring to underground caves, tunnels and crypts that can be found in the game as well as the act of testing out different routes.

The game contains much of our research gathered while on residency at Sirius and was the first work encountered by visitors to the exhibition. Players could take time to explore an abstracted seaside village with hundreds of different paths to choose. We compiled our research in this way in order to encourage close looking as well as telling the story of a place in a non-hierarchical order and with multiple vantage points. Here the viewer can act as an agent and uncover their own meaning by choosing their own path through the darkness.

- Flicker

25" 21' HD video

(stills from this video were exhibited as lenticular prints at ‘Historica – Republican Aesthetics’, IMMA 2016-17; Flicker was acquired by the Arts Council of Ireland Collection in 2020)

A flickering refrain shows two hands of the artists navigate a circular board in order to evoke sea navigation, remote communication, psychic planchettes and tv noise. An Irish language voiceover is misinterpreted by automatically generated English subtitles.

- Optical Tower

mild steel, HD video, salt water

The tower is a functional sculpture designed to house a projector, modelled on the Spitbank Lighthouse, the former Optical Tower at Verolme Dockyard and the magic lanterns used by the 1870’s Young Men’s Society of Harbour Row, Cobh. The sculpture was designed in collaboration with and fabricated by Donal Dilworth (National Sculpture Factory and ex-Verolme Cork Dockyard worker) and built using mild steel, similar to that used in shipbuilding.

The piece points to the ingenuity of workers at the now closed Verolme Dockyard (Rushbrooke) and Irish Steel plant (Haulbowline), as well as the blind engineer who built the Spitbank Lighthouse across the bay.

The basin contains seawater and French chalk (used for marking steel to cut) and rusted over the course of the exhibition. The projected images are a sequence of shots taken from a navy boat trip around the Irish Steel slag heaps (piles of refuse, or the byproduct of the former steel industry). The saturated imagery nods to the introduction of technicolour also 100 years ago.

- Unaccountable Rhythms

an evening of site specific performances by Rachel Ní Chuinn, Ruth Clinton, Isadora Epstein & Niamh Moriarty relating to Daylight Savings Time, Cork Medium Geraldine Cummins and the Old Yacht Club setting.

This project was kindly funded and supported by The Sirius Arts Centre, The Arts Council of Ireland, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios and The National Sculpture Factory.

Artists’ book by Ruth Clinton, Niamh Moriarty and Michael Hill (100 Years Ago Today). 

Launched at the Zoological Museum, Trinity College Dublin December 2018

To order a copy, please contact us at ruthandniamh [at] gmail.com

This publication compiles numerous images from the travels of Richard W.G. Hingston (1887-1966) to the Himalayas and neighbouring Pamir mountain range, with many of his photographs published here for the first time. The texts, relayed through the voices of insect and arachnid specimens, convey experiences of time, ecology, displacement, conflict, and loss.

Cork-born Hingston worked as a British medical officer during the first and second World Wars. Later in life he became an explorer in his own right, writing extensively on animal habitats and behaviours. His publications and diaries, housed in the Trinity College Dublin Manuscripts Library, reveal an ambivalent attitude towards the wars of the British Empire as well as some unexpectedly romantic meditations on nature. His lantern slides of colonial explorers and their guides, seemingly overwhelmed by the magnitude of the icy landscapes they were navigating, set the scene for our writing.

The hardback book is the second published collaboration between Ruth Clinton, Michael Hill and Niamh Moriarty, following Wound with a Tear (2016), also published by 100 Years Ago Today. Printed in an edition of 200 copies, Standing Above Every Thing / idle days and minor battles includes a glow in the dark screen printed bookmark, risograph poster/dust jacket, and additional printed inserts. The book and its launch were supported by Trinity College Dublin, through the Provost’s Academic Development Fund, and Fingal County Council.

Images:

1 & 2: Black and white glass slides from Hingston’s travels to the Himalayas and Mount Everest 1920-1924, courtesy of Trinity College Dublin & Jill (Sheilagh) Hingston

3: Standing Above Everything, publication photograph courtesy of Michael Hill & 100 Years Ago Today

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Excerpts:

It is difficult to wait in patience, watching the shifting of the scantiest of fauna. Tiny little things no bigger than my left claw come crashing through, some passing clean through the gaps, others not so fortunate. They catch themselves in a neat little row, struggling and vibrating and looking like drops of black rain, made blurry by the wind. I do not leave my post, seeing no immediate need to intervene. These guests are too small to cause any significant damage so I just let them quiver away to their hearts’ content, quite sure that they will soon exhaust themselves. In time they lie still.

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We keep ourselves well hidden, not knowing why we persevere still, as we burrow into the soft comfort of the earth. This is where we will endure our last transfiguration. We lie in contemplation, our juvenile organs gradually disintegrating as we await the next stage of our lives.

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offsite exhibition at Trinity College Dublin

August 2014 

in association with The Douglas Hyde Gallery

curated by Michael Hill

Wound with a Tear centred around a series of interdepartmental memoranda exchanged between the Old Library at Trinity College and The Museum Building next door. The exhibition also included a map of the campus, directions for walking around and a series of site specific interventions. This work has since been adapted as an artists' book.

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Wound with a Tear, artists' book, 2016

This book was handmade collaboratively with Michael Hill and includes a series of original photographs and fictional interdepartmental memoranda together with a title illustration by Jane Lives. For more information please see: 100 Years Ago Today.

The book was included in the Dublin Art Book Fair (DABF 2016) at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, where we read excerpts from the texts together with Francis Halsall.

residency and exhibition at Pallas Projects/Studios

March 2013

- Catalogue

- Info Sheet

- Rotator Tour

(collaborative response by Ruth Clinton, Niamh Moriarty, Michael O'Rourke and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen performed on 22 March 2013).

Works:

- Poddle

photograph, fountain

- Lacuna

projection, felt, water

- ROTATOR (.-. --- - .- - --- )

hacked siren light

- Wormhole

drainpipe periscope

- Spool-loops

2-channel video installation, 2 dv camcorders, 2 x dv tapes each with 2h continuous footage

- Tour(-2)
projection and custom-made screen under a staircase

exhibition at Broadstone Studios

May 2014

curated by Lily Cahill & Rob Murphy

- Info Sheet

Works in order of location:

- unnamed labyrinth

2,000 individually painted phosphorescent beach stones

2-channel video

- unnamed scrolling cumulative verse text

bath, projection, milk

- unnamed photo series

photos of fog and landscapes engulfed by invasive creepers

- unnamed projection

projected photograph, fog machine, fruit flies

unnamed scrolling cumulative verse text (bath, projection, milk) toured to ‘House Party’, a group show at Ladette Space in Peckham, London in summer 2014.

offsite gathering at Black Mountain, Belfast

Valentine’s Day 2014

and digital radio station

as part of An Active Encounter,

curated by Ciara Hickey

essay by Ciara Hickey

’An Active Encounter’ at PS² Belfast combined events, interventions and discussions around Tamás St. Turba's ‘Czechoslovak Radio 1968’. The work consists of a red building brick with chalk markings drawn onto the sides denoting the dials of a radio. When Czechoslovakia was invaded by the Soviet army in 1968, people resisted through creative means. After people were forbidden to listen to radio broadcasts, they started attaching antennas to bricks as a sign of protest. These fake radios spread among the population who pretended to listen to them, and although they were useless as a communication device, they were continuously confiscated by the Russian Army.

We experimented in raising both conscious and subconscious awareness of the brick/radio at PS² through tactics of disorientation, interference, listening, clue-placement, allusion, misdirection and ‘going widdershins’. The work culminated in a Czechoslovak Radio 1968 fan club meeting which took place on Valentine’s day at 3pm, starting in the gallery and traveling to a secret location. We also ran an internet radio station between the 10th and 14th of February which explored our meditations and research on the brick/radio through readings, noise music, storytelling and archival recordings. Research material was presented by a range of voices, from north and south of the border, including the following music and texts:

Samuel Beckett's ‘Text for Nothing #8’ (1950-52); Baltic Revolution folk and pop songs from 1980s Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia; mvestle and Ellll, noise music from Cork (2014+); The International Parallel Union of Telecommunications Manifesto (Hungary, 1968); Timothy Leary's 1973 Starseed Communication; Henry Flynt's 1980s experimental music; Michel Serres' Parasite parables (1980); the theory of the refrain from ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980); Robert Smithson's 1968 ‘Theory of Nonsites’; Nikola Tesla's 1900 ‘Problem of Increasing Human Energy’; chapter 2 of ‘The Little Prince’ by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943; George Orwell's 1984 radio adaptation, 1953; 1970s fluxus letters from Ray Johnson; Emma Goldman for Mother Earth magazine, 1906; the Ancient Greek Katabasis myth, and John Cage's short stories as well as his 1961 ‘Lecture on Silence’ and 1967 ‘A Year From Monday‘. 

The earnest attention directed by the citizens of Prague towards the brick radios they made according to Tamás St. Turba’s instruction: ‘cover a brick in newspaper and listen to it on the street’, bestowed these mute devices with a powerful recalcitrance as protest objects, their withdrawn silence becoming like a shared code amongst listeners. However, the radio brick is a potent entity independently of this energy invested in it. It seems to hover between two states, not-quite-brick and not-quite-radio; sometimes an ex-brick turned radio and sometimes a brick which, once decommissioned, has only a dim memory of being a radio, its sulphurous markings the only trace of its former existence. This mysterious dimension reflects perhaps the strange space opened up by metaphor and allusion in which things bump against each other, hinting at their remote realities. The shuttling back and forth between brick/radio and radio/brick causes it to become ontologically destabilised as well as estranged from the world and itself. And, as an artwork it demonstrates a moment in which, through the contemplation of an object, the world becomes unfamiliar; somehow resistant yet emitting enough faint noise to keep us listening.

site-specific group exhibition at the Deer Park Hotel, Howth

October 2014

initiated & curated by Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty

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The Deer Park Hotel closed for business on April Fool's Day in 2014. In October, we organised a group exhibition, a film screening of Francis Ford Coppola's first feature film (a horror b-movie called Dementia 13 shot around the grounds of Howth Castle), and 'Falling Backwards', an experimental music event inside the hotel swimming pool with Rachel Ní Chuinn and mvestle (photograph below by Hugh McCabe).

Artists:

1. Andy Fitz

2. Daniel Tuomey

3. Sally-Anne Kelly

4. mvestle

5. Rachel Ní Chuinn

6. Ella de Burca

7. Lily Cahill & Rob Murphy

8. Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty (see below)

9. Matthew Slack

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Works by Ruth & Niamh:

Fog Detector
photograph, projection, mirror, dry shampoo

The Bloody Steamroom

5’ video tape loop, hotel kettle, plug timer

Storm-chasers
2’ 47” digital video loop, mini tv/radio receiver, parked car (hotel car park)

Our work comprised three short video installations made for the changing room, steam room and car park.

‘Fog Detector’ was installed in a changing-room booth, comprising an infinite video-loop of a rotating lighthouse bulb (projected onto a mirror using dry shampoo); and two photographs affixed to a pin board.

’The Bloody Steamroom’ was a 5-minute video tape loop (the amount of time it takes to boil a small hotel kettle) installed on a box TV inside a poolside steam room, accompanied by a kettle boiling on a timer. The video was made around the grounds of the hotel, where the underground Bloody Stream appears above ground briefly in an untended patch of land taken over by exotic creepers and teenage graffiti artists.

'Storm-chasers', a 2 minute video-loop of lightning striking Howth head, was installed on a small camping television in the back window of a car in the hotel car park.

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This project was kindly funded and supported by Fingal Arts Office.

Losing Track

6’ 33” video and snug-story-telling fan fiction

Residency and presentation at Askeaton Contemporary Arts: Welcome to the Neighbourhood

Summer 2018

Curated by Michele Horrigan

During our two weeks in Askeaton, we took the local train station and disused railway as a starting point to consider a limited world of compartments, all bound to a strict schedule. For this, we investigated the long-standing use of trains in storytelling and film, the Shannon-Foynes Port Company "VISION 2041" development plan (that would see the line reopened to freight from Panamax vessels) as well as local legends and attractions including the Flying Boat Museum at the end of the line in Foynes.

Our visit culminated in a small body of work titled ‘Losing Track’, comprising a fanfiction account of actor Kiefer Sutherland's fateful visit to the town of Askeaton and beyond in 1992 and an accompanying video piece. We recited this story in unison, as an apparent train of thought, to one or two visitors at a time in a tiny local pub snug. Meanwhile, the video loop played in the adjacent bar, telling the same story of false idols, touristic fatigue and the threat of progress—through scenery alone.

In 2022 this piece was adapted into a short video for the ‘Only in Askeaton’ media channel, with a score and subtitles, following the rhythm of our voices as we told the story.

This engagement was the first part of an ongoing research project along the Western Rail Corridor in the West of Ireland.

12’ 57’’ Radio Play

The Model, Sligo

2021

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Artist voiced by Peter Broderick
Bureaucrat voiced by Ruth Clinton
Additional voices and sounds by Cormac MacDiarmada and Niamh Moriarty
Music by Aoife Hammond & Ruth Clinton

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This radio play was partly inspired by a Jack B. Yeats painting, ‘Man on a Train, Thinking,’ (1927) and a grisly ghost story told by the artist at the annual RHA dinner. A surreal comedy plays out between two conflicting projections of Irish national identity as it was being constructed in the early days of Irish Independence. Blending historical research and present-day conspiracies, the train is used as a metaphor for enduring binary debates such as public versus private; progress versus nostalgia; tourism versus conservation and even Dublin versus the rest of Ireland.

Full audio

Full script

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‘GO WEST’ was selected as part of the annual Pallas Projects Periodical Review, ‘12: Practical Magic’ with Basic Space in 2022.

Excerpts of this radio play and a sequel titled ‘Stone by Stone’ featuring the voice of Patrick Curley were included in a solstice radio special ‘Last Stop : Grianstad’ presented by Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty on Dublin Digital Radio and broadcast from the Rainbow Ballroom of Romance in Glenfarne, Co. Leitrim on 21 December 2021 (see stills from live visuals left).

Concert and Video Vignettes

Solas Nua, Washington D.C., International Women’s Day and the 15th annual Capitol Irish Film Festival - March 2021

The Model Sligo, Depth of Field film shorts at Out of Step festival - May 2022

Press Release:

Two Miles Of Earth For A Marking Stone is a concert of traditional songs by the Irish four-part harmony group Landless, with an experimental video accompaniment produced for International Women’s Day 2021 by artists Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty all filmed outdoors between Leitrim and Sligo in winter 2020/21.

Brigid, the Irish pre-Christian goddess of poetry, is the inspiration for a psychic vision exploring feelings of intangible longing arising from experiences of emigration. Film clips set in the North-West of Ireland appear as interjections through the music, with the themes of the songs mirroring each corresponding scene in the saga. The songs follow the story of two sisters, who journey across the ocean and through a mountain, representing a search for a better future as well as a descent into the subconscious and destructive forms of ‘progress’. When her son Ruadán fell in battle, Brigid is said to have cried out - the first time keening was heard in Ireland. Landless’ singing can be thought of as a kind of keening, as might have been heard at an ‘American wake’, held on the eve of the emigrant journey.

Landless are Lily Power, Meabh Meir, Ruth Clinton and Sinead Lynch. Based in Dublin, Belfast and Sligo, they sing unaccompanied traditional songs in close four-part harmony. For this performance they will be joined by Consuelo Breschi (Varo/Nomadic Piano Project). Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty are collaborative artists based in the North-West of Ireland who use performance, video, sound installation and storytelling, informed by site-responsive research in order to open up spaces of renewed reflection.

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Video Credits

Concert:
Thom McDermott - Camera/Edit
Sean Treacy - Camera/Lighting
John Spud Murphy - Live Sound Recording, Mixing and Production

Cantique Typeface by Sébastien Hayez for Velvetyne Libre & Open Source Type Foundry

With thanks to Miranda Driscoll, Aoife Hammond & Cormac MacDiarmada

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Kindly supported by the Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, the US Embassy of Ireland and the Northern Ireland Bureau in Washington DC.

HD Video and Soundscape

Cairde Sligo Arts Festival

July 2020

Press Release:

Echolocation is a 25 minute performative story filmed and recorded on location between the artists' homes in Leitrim and Sligo. Festival-goers in Sligo [were] invited to take a solitary walk around Doorly Park while listening in online. The work is best heard using stereo speakers or headphones.

The story of a set of twins who inadvertently start a popular protest movement in their local forest is told as a nonsensical one-sided phone conversation. While enacting a peaceful tree-top sit-in, the twins are confronted with parallel struggles of technological progress versus heritage; communication versus interference and surveillance, and conservation versus tourism. An in-unison story-telling technique is coupled with mirror imagery and layered sound, in order to convey an atmosphere of collapsing time, displacement and uncertainty.

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Inspired by media accounts of popular Irish protest movements from the last 25 years, including a campaign to save the Glen of the Downs’ old-growth woodland threatened by road construction; efforts to block Royal Dutch Shell from laying natural gas pipeline through a small rural village; and ongoing anti-war actions against US military use of Shannon Airport, our present research concerns Ireland’s complicated relationship with its colonial past and capitalist present.

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With thanks to Aoife Hammond and Cormac MacDiarmada. This project was kindly supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Askeaton Contemporary Arts and Fingal County Council.

30 minute artists’ talk and slide-show

Publication Scaffold, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios’ Dublin Art Book Fair (DABF2019)

November 2019

Curated by Michele Horrigan, Sean Lynch and Jo Melvin.

This talk was a presentation of our ongoing research project along the Great Western Railway. Here, we present our processes through a story-telling exercise, using an abandoned railway line as a channel for exploring popular visions of ‘The West’, as a frontier in both Irish and Irish-American imaginations. Taking our own bodies and the abandoned railway as a starting point, we set off on a walking pilgrimage in Easter 2019, connecting two points once made proximate by the train line: Collooney Train Station in suburban Sligo and Colbert Station in Limerick City.

Paradoxically associated with exile and escape, remote beauty and hostile nature, the idea of going west is intrinsic to the Irish historical narrative, from plantation to emigration and early American settlement. A doubling back is enacted both through Irish fascination with US culture, e.g. the phenomenal success of Country & Irish music, as well as the Irish-American ‘return home’, as epitomised in films such as John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952). For this presentation, we aim to capture a sense of fragmented yet intertwined identities on each side of the Atlantic.

This piece uses slide-show photographs, graphics, illustrations, sound and video clips to follow a satirical impression of our own journey west. In one anecdote, the Knock apparition is retold as a modern-day extraterrestrial event, prompting an alternative pilgrimage. In another, two special interest groups hold polarising views on the impact of rural electrification on the filming of ‘The Quiet Man’.

Excerpts from this performance are included in the Publication Scaffold Podcast, broadcast on Dublin Digital Radio on 27 March.

Slides (clockwise from top left above):

Literal Enlightenment of the People of the Remote Irish Countryside: an Appreciation and Networking Society - logo

It was me Murph, Interstellar (2014) - still

Knock model village c.1879 - promotional video screen shot

Fermi’s Paradox - neon sign render

Great Western Railway (somewhere near Swinford) - photograph

Society for the Acknowledgement of Hollywood's Troubles with Irish Rural Electrification - logo

Bord na Móna - imagined RTÉ news segment

Kiltimagh town sculpture - photograph

Sundial - notebook drawing

2 x 20’ video installations

2017

Two silent videos consider in-between states such as twilight, passageways and coastlines, and their potential to be spaces for meditation as well as navigation. Moving between the sculpture garden of Ruth’s grandfather, Kieran Kelly, and its surrounding landscapes, the artists send and receive light signals in order to project painterly visions of the celestial and the terrestrial.

This piece was screened, in part, accompanied a live score by Ruth and Cormac MacDiarmada at BASIC TALKS, Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane, 2018.

Made by commission for Carol Bellamy Collections.

The Bucking Fastard

in-unison performance, August 2014

Foaming at the Mouth 3, visual art spoken word

Stag’s Head, Dublin

A 10 minute story based on a 2 hour interview with Werner Herzog where he describes a pair of inseparable twins who speak in unison, told simultaneously.

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I am fit and well and at last come into my own

Foaming at the Mouth 6, Mazreb, Amsterdam, July 2015

& 'Effort', Dada Post, Berlin, 2017

A 15 minute in-unison performance, later reprised as a remote telepathic recital and banner-making exercise.

The true story of a set of twins who hate each other with a vicious passion but who also can't bear to be apart from one another.

installation as part of  ‘Amharc Fhine Gall X: Transhistorical Terrain’

joint exhibition with Ella de Burca

Draíocht, Blanchardstown, 2015-2016

- Invitation

Works:

- setting

250 x 300 digital c-type prints on dibond (series of 3 - sold in aid of the Coalition to Repeal the 8th Amendment to the Irish Constitution (The Right to Bodily Autonomy) and the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre).

- Frances in the Basement with the Revolver (Spoiler)

2' 32" digital video & photo montage (variable)

- found object (script)

accompanying text:

Instead of the cross, the Albatross / about my neck was hung

We all walked across the bridge and when we came to the end everybody clapped.  Then we turned around and went back the way we came: through the elevated tunnel, down the pristine wainscoted staircase, across the parquet floor of the hallway and out, emerging beneath an imposing neoclassical portico. Upon exiting the building we felt unsure of ourselves. Should we go for another round of applause? This seemed excessive so instead we just smiled, nodded and shook hands. The thrill of the crossing had begun to wear off and we were left with the sobering sight of a suburban housing estate and a damp November afternoon.

That was our first crossing. We had procured, from a sympathetic insider, the code to the gate that guards the entrance to the bridge—a closely kept secret—and this served as a basis for our calculations.

1+9+4+5=19

1+9=10

1+0=1

1 for the first crossing; 1 for the letters A, J and S. This meant that it should be a Saturday Afternoon in January. Unfortunately, it was October when we made this plan and we were anxious to get going so a Saturday Afternoon in November would have to suffice. Looking back, this was probably a mistake. 

The day of the second crossing was to be determined by the building’s postal code: D20 N207.

D=4, N=5

4+2+0+5+2+0+7=20

2+0=2

2 for the second crossing; 2 for the letters B, K and T. We were unsure of the meaning of this new set of letters. T could be a Thursday, but more likely would be Tuesday because it is the second day of the week. Tuesday Bridge Krossing? In the end we decided to just repeat the Saturday Afternoon in November formula, as there were still three of them left that year. There was some debate about whether to continue as planned: not everybody was comfortable with so flippantly ignoring the numbers. But it was agreed that we should waste no time in returning. The next stage of the crossing was to move further in, beyond the first step of the far side of the bridge—the point at which we had politely applauded ourselves.

There was a rumour that they kept the clocks running twenty-five minutes late on the other side; some people thought that explained the faint sensation of jet lag that crossers experience upon their return. Supposedly the circadian rhythm of your body is thrown by the short jolt back and then forward again before your mind has time to adjust to the shift. But this was perceived as a minor side-effect and could be easily prevented given the correct mental preparation. It certainly did not deter us as we once again passed beneath the great portico, crossed the hall, ascended the stairs and paused momentarily at the entrance to the tunnel.  With little hesitation we all trotted across to the other side. No time for celebrations as everybody jostled through the door at the end of the short flight of steps leading away from the bridge. We stood silently on the dim landing, uncomfortably close together, but nobody was willing to stray. As before there was a sense of haplessness in the group once we had reached our objective. What now? In our haste to return we had not thought to consult the numbers about how to proceed from here. 

There were murmurings of discomfort. A faint, yet undeniable sensation of slow, gnawing bone-wetness began to rise up through the soles of our feet, along our shins and around our kneecaps. Simultaneously, a subtle weight leaned against each chest, causing everybody’s breathing to become shallow and unsatisfying. A dark damp permeated the air. We had not expected this and it was clear that the initial excitement of the second crossing had slowly transformed into a feeling of dejected, nauseous dread. Nobody wanted to be the first to turn back. Feeling dizzy then the group began to sway on the too-small landing, teetering over the edge of the steps and then back towards the way we came in. Of course the question on everyone’s mind was whether this awful discomfort was to do with the clocks. “B, K, T!” someone shouted hysterically, “Bridges Kill Time!” This was too much to bear and as one mass we scrambled for the door, ran back across the bridge, down the stairs, across the hall and out, panting, beneath the portico. Nobody shook hands.

There are various theories about what went wrong on the second crossing. The one we have come to accept is the following: the human heart beats eighty times per minute, or one hundred and fifteen thousand two hundred times a day. Our day was temporarily shortened to twenty-three hours thirty-five minutes, or one thousand four hundred and fifteen minutes, when we crossed over. Our hearts have become stuck in this time lapse and now try to beat the usual number of beats but in less time, meaning of course that they all move slightly faster than before. Our bodies belong to the past, creating a disjuncture in our souls from the here and now. We will never escape the low-level anxiety to which we condemned ourselves; we have the numbers to thank for that.

1440 X 80= 115200

1415 X 80= 113200

115200-113200= 2000

2+0+0+0= 2= B, K, T. 

Information They Don’t Want You to Know

informative booklet made in collaboration with Michelle Doyle

launched at The Joinery Gallery

November 2014

Press Release:

Please join us in a celebration of the trailblazing publication: FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE, 8th Edition. This co-written brochure examines methods for survival and collective living, as well as claiming and maintaining territory in the area of Stoneybatter, Dublin 7 in the year 2014. Join us as we find alternative sources of fresh water; implement asset protection strategies and initiate team-building exercises in order to produce extraordinary levels of successful living. As you read through this manual for everyday ingenuity, you will see that the results we obtained through our experiments were literally off the test scales. We explain how to use tactics of disorientation, interference, non-hierarchical organisation, infiltration, surveillance, listening, clue-placement and misdirection to unlock the potentials of our surroundings. This totally new approach to living is available to all: you just have to grab a copy of this inspirational pamphlet at 7PM on Thursday the 20th of November at the Joinery Gallery on Arbour Hill. The time has come to ignore the naysayers and become a superachiever!

exhibition, Roscommon Arts Centre,

Autumn 2013

- Leaflet

Works:

- Hill of Bones

18’ 35” Video (compressed)

- reifier

13' 16'' mini digital video tape (silent)

Hill of Bones is part of the MexIndex digital repository for experimental video.

Hilltown Festival, Westmeath

July 2013

Using each other as guides we compiled a series of videos that follow an imagined transcendence path or labyrinth, retracing the same number of paces and orientation at different locations each time. This structure was mapped out according to these rules using 2,000 hand-painted phosphorescent stones at the site of the Hilltown festival in Westmeath. The split-screen videos were installed in a nearby stable.

performance and installation at Red Rock beach, Sutton

April 2013

initiated with Richard Proffitt

Images from Pink Moon were included in Paper Visual Art Journal: Dublin (Volume 5) alongside a short text entitled Marconigrams. These were also exhibited at ‘The Earth Rings in Your Ears’, Eight Gallery, 2013.

Wishing You a Relatively Safe Trip

response by Rob Murphy

"Thinking about the work today and last night, it was really perfect. I don't know what your exact hopes for it were but it was exciting and depressing and ended horror-funny.

The entire lead up really worked, everyone on the bus was glued to the window and arguing over numbers of stops so it felt like a summer project trip as a kid or some crap cheapo tourist non-adventure. The 'indecision' in direction from Niamh was annoying in a good way. The raft was one of the most underwhelming things I've ever experienced. It was brilliant. Like a properly shit self discovery oneness with nothing but a wet arse and glow-sticks. That whole movement in art at the moment to imbue objects with timeless knowledge and mysticism was well and truly smashed by the raft experience. It was that idea that you are having some transitional moment at once, then realising that you are pathetically close to the shore, held by a concerned minder and being stared at by all your mates who are queuing up for some 'mosneytrip'.

I felt properly stupid and it made me laugh so much while on the raft. Really relatively safe and depressing. The absence of you Ruth was also effective. I felt like I was being monitored from afar on my experience and it gave it a real sinister feeling that I was being used in a new age experiment by some pseudo hippy psychologist loser with a smelly herbal tea stained jumper.

The whole thing was un-life affirming and hilarious, which was very sad."

residency and site-responsive performance

as part of The Joinery Graduate Residency Series: Experiments in Sound

November 2012

booklet

press release:

During this residency, Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty will investigate two of Dublin’s underground rivers: the Oxmantown Stream and the River Bradoge. Two related pieces will explore the concept of resonant events being recorded and subsequently replayed near areas of water, using different methods of subtitling to mediate between the city’s hidden streams and the audience as a potentially unreliable narrator. Moriarty and Clinton will endeavour to resurrect the submerged and muted rivers, conducting an intimate tour along these secret waterways. The aural subtitles of the walk will be complemented by an installation in the Joinery that will use visual cues from the text of the walking tour. The two works will connect the gallery and the city and emphasise the physical and historical depth of place through evocative sound. Subtitles become a narrative stream of consciousness, emphasising the silence of the buried rivers.

Up through the wather your secret rises;

The stones won’t keep it, and it lifts the mould,

An’ it tracks your footsteps, and yoar fun surprises

An’ it sits at the fire beside you black and cowld

- Sheridan Le Fanu, The House by the Churchyard

*

Night walks took place on Thursday 15 November and day walks on Sunday 18 November. The performance lasted approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes.

hand-made song book, walkie-talkie, semaphore & singing performance

May 2012

The culmination of a week-long residency at Portsalon, Donegal, this headland performance, transmission and limited edition booklet followed an epic nonsense verse song, in which female characters Apollo and Dionysus are transported to the sea above the sky.

Resort was a ten day long residency initiated by John Ryan and Tom Watt in 2012. The project was undertaken by thirteen artists and ended with a site specific exhibition along a cliff path, beach and woodland at Ballymastocker Bay, Portsalon, Donegal.

12’ 21” radio play / eulogy

April 2012

presented as part of ‘Prelude to Nothing: selected and devised works to mark a moment of finality’

The LAB Gallery, curated by David Fagan

Prelude to Nothing was a live event to mark the final hours before the transmission of analogue satellite television channels to Europe was discontinued. With accompanying texts by Patricia Garcia, Tracy Hanna and Ruth Clinton.

11’ 09” digital video installation

2011

exhibited as part of ‘Give up the Ghost’ group exhibition at Pallas Projects / Studios

Hand-made eagles are flung from a cliff in super slow-motion as a reenactment of a recent, fated conservation effort.

This video was completed as part of the digital media residency at Fire Station artist studios (2010-11).

8’ 01” digital video

2011

Screened at Darklight International Film Festival, Dublin and Days on End Experimental Sound Festival, Cork (both 2012).

A haunted protagonist receives transmissions from an obsolete fog horn and routinely culled fallow deer.

This short sci-fi film was completed as part of the digital media residency at Fire Station artist studios (2010-11).