The Act of Leaving: Sounding Arrival & Dreaming of Departure
September/October 2008
Cork docklands, as part of ArtTrail 2008
Sounding Arrival was developed as a site-specific audiovisual installation within a large disused cold-storage space at the Southern Fruit Warehouse, Cork City. The soundtrack takes advantage of the natural sound reverberation produced by the large space. On a visual level, the observer, enveloped in total darkness, perceives the bank of gleaming TV monitors in the distance, which work alongside the architecture of the supporting columns within the space.
Dreaming of Departure was developed as a site-specific audiovisual installation within the basement of the round tower of the Blackrock Castle Observatory. Polar to Sounding Arrival, this installation is placed within a small, intimate space. Visitors are invited to lie down on a specially constructed bed to experience various sound and visual sources situated around them.
Stalling and Kelly commonly create works that are site-specific, but Sounding Arrival is acoustically specific to its presentation space. What is striking about this installation is its dependence on the physical and spatial properties of light and sound and how these resonate in an environment. On the molecular level, sound is the physical disturbance of a medium resulting in the excitation of models.
from Polyphonic Resonance: Sound Art in Ireland by EL Putnam
Performance Art In Ireland: A History, edited by Áine Philips