The Sea Around Us - Online Catalogue

the composer Karen Power to produce new audio
work for the show it fully commits to the nonocular.
The piece, entitled no man’s land, is based
on specially made field recordings that uncover
the unique sonic profile of the Sligo seaboard.
Power, in collaboration with soprano Michelle
O’Rourke, open the exhibition with a performance
immersing us in the tonality of the ocean and
reconnecting us with this otherworldly sensorium.
In Shaun Gladwell’s Storm Sequence, 2000
Morton’s ‘strange stranger’ is evoked, with the
oncoming storm as the ‘other’. The mesmerising
work slowly unfolds with a skateboarder and
the storm dancing together, waves rising behind
him on Bondi Beach, until the storm’s intensity
ends the entanglement; the rhythms of the storm
become too powerful for it to continue. This
feeling of otherness is evident too in Susanne M.
Winterling’s work, planetary opera in three acts,
divided by the currents, 2018; through sound and
image she inverts the relationship between the
ocean and us. We are immersed in a multi-species
experience, where space becomes borderless and
we co-exist with the maritime. Another tool with
which to build new worlds is opened up.
All the works speak on our behalf and in talking
loudly, the complexity of our relationship with
the sea is revealed. The works don’t stand still;
they break the bad habit of viewing the ocean as
something over there and in doing so reconnect
us. Our terrestrial realities blur and new worlds
are built. The words of Emily Dickinson flow in,
‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant’. 14 These words
seem to fit this aquatic storytelling place.
I break the surface one last time. Underwater
shards of light shift my gaze – they cut through
planes and I see things slant through the blue
watery world. ‘The truth must dazzle gradually’
Dickinson tells us. Glancing up from the sandy
bottom the light splits and splits again.
Rainbowing, it dazzles me slowly.
Rosie O’Reilly, 2020
Works Cited
1
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the trouble,
Making Kin in the Chthulucene. 2016, Duke
University Press. Durham and London
2
https://maps.biodiversityireland.ie. 28/01/2019
3
Ibid Haraway.
4
‘Homo erectus at Trinil on Java used shells for tool
production and engraving” https://www.nature.
com/articles/nature13962. 14/02/2020
5
External auditory exostoses among western
Eurasian late Middle and Late Pleistocene humans.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/
article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0220464.
14/02/2020
6
The Waterside Ape. BBC Radio 4 Documentary.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07v0hhm
07/01/2020
7
Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology. For a Logic of
Future Coexistence. 2016, Columbia University
Press. New York
8
Tiadalectics. Imagining an Oceanic Worldview
through Art and Science. Edited by Stefanie
Hessler. 2018. TBA21-Academy, London. The MIT
Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London.
9
Ibid Hessler.
10
https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-briefs/
ocean-and-climate-change. 05/12/19
11
https://www.iom.int/news/iom-mediterranean-
arrivals-reach-110699-2019-deaths-reach-1283-
world-deaths-fall. 05/02/2020
12
Etal Adnan. Sea and Fog. 2012, Nightboat Books,
New York
13
https://forensic-architecture.org/about/agency.
06/02/2020
14
The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading
Edition, The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1998
11
12