Living Canvas
Wilton Park, solo 2023
Siobhan McDonald has been selected to exhibit at the Living Canvas. Located at Wilton Park, Living Canvas is one of the world’s first outdoor digital screens dedicated exclusively to artistic and cultural content, transforming Dublin into a unique open-air gallery. This curved LED display, measuring 21 metres wide and 4 metres high, is the largest outdoor screen in Europe solely dedicated to cultural use.
At the Edge of Visibility 4 minute, Premiered at Deutsches Hygiene-Museum ‘Shine on me’ curated by Katherine Nichols.
By 1823 the North American Arctic was still the last undiscovered ecosystem on the planet. It was a landscape so cold that it fractured everything it penetrated, including the stones. It was uncharted, unclaimed territory and Europeans had perished in it miserably. The artist embarked on an expedition to explore this beautiful and vital Arctic ice which holds a memory that extends for millions of years into the past. At the Edge of Visibility explores the slow workings of geological processes found deep in permafrost, meditating on the sentience of ice.
The sound piece plays with a world rhythm in subtle ways to explore a Byzantine Manuscript that illustrates the physics of a pure vibrational frequency and how notions of
The Pythagorean “harmony of the spheres” (Johannes Kepler) once served as a universal model for explaining the order of the cosmos. The simple chord structures, based on fifths, creates changing sound surfaces generated with the aid of humming devices and site recordings from the melting glaciers and exposed boglands.
Composer: Jonathan Nangle (IE); Scientist: Chris Bean Senior Professor and Head of Geophysics at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) (IE) STUDIOTOPIA is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
This sonic score responds to the changing acoustic environment of the Arctic and how changes from declining sea ice and increasing industrial human use is influencing Arctis turned into an acoustic composition. The instruments lowered to different levels and temperatures record earthquakes, landslides, wildlife, pollution and meltwater, creating an archive of the “ocean’s memory” c marine mammal decline.
LINKS:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct63cx
A BBC WORLD SERIES: 'Will unicorns of the sea fall silent'; (2023)