Still life

Still Life. text, 2019

Still Life, 2019, (installation view, The Attic, Dublin, 2020) HD sound & video 42 sec loop, HD monitor 53 cm x 81 cm. smoked & tempered glass 48 cm x 78 cm, fractured concrete slabs variable. 53 cm x 81 cm x 35 cm

The idea for “Still Life” came from a reading of Plato’s dialogue, ” Timaeus” (c. 360 BC). In Timaeus, Plato presents a richly formed account of the materialisation of the universe and explains its impressive order and magnificence. The cosmos, he proposes, is the product of logical, purposive, and beneficent agency. It is the handiwork of a celestial architect who, reproducing a fixed and everlasting model, imposes mathematical order on pre-existent chaos to generate the ordered universe.1

I began by adapting Timaeus’ three accounts into a text work, then utilised the text as a framework to inform my working methodology. I was drawn to experimentation with sound and video, filming various light and audio sources around Dublin City as I charted my movements. One night as I sat in a parked car, I focused the lens on the dashboard of fluctuating indicators, operating the camera close to the subjects, distorting the focal range and colour tonalities while observing the peculiarities of manipulating digital video. The looped video footage occupied the monitor’s entire screen, positioning the glass panes and rocks over the screen to produce balance and tension in work—the tonalities of fluctuating video light fade in and out of the rocky assemblage. The text was then further utilised to inform the composition and sequence of these time exposure stills.

Keeping with Timaeus as an overarching theme, Still Life became a meditation on biographical events and environmental references. Reflecting on the reverberation of one who has passed on, the perpetual forces of nature, and the physical and metaphysical experience of being.

In Loving Memory of Anthony (Tony) Byrne

¹ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-timaeus/