Our poster!

Exhibition Artist statement.

This sound work explores the theme of boundaries. I recorded the sound of the crowd of two bordering county teams during a hurling match. I found the primal guttural noise intriguing.

Just thought I'd put up the names of some of the artists I've been looking at lately...Amar Kanwar, Wang quinsong, Qin Ga, Ruben Ochoa, Nina Katchadourian, Simon Patterson, Grayson Perry (really cool)..

So finally I recorded the hurling match after a lot of procrastinating, the match was between Kilkenny and Tipperary- two bordering counties. I had a great time and the sound from it turned out great! The sound of the crowd had a tendency to rise and fall when excited by something happening, this sounded really gutteral and primal almost as if they were all so engrossed by what was going on they couldn't control the noise that came from them. I decided to focus in on this and use it to give people the experience of being there of the sound of the excitement causing this deep feeling of excitement, of slight anxiety maybe? I was using the sound for a multimedia project and cut and pasted all the rising and falling sounds of the crowd together then did a little bit more editing. Now i'm using it for my class exhibiton which is on tomorrow in this cool place called Stix in Limerick! I'm really excited about the sound and the exhibition, I'm just crossing my fingers it all goes well because we're all getting a little bit more than stressed at this point trying to get everything done! P.S.: Sorry about the lack of pictures lately I'll be putting some up of the opening night soon!

While I was thinking about the previous idea I started to research the different wars that occured in Europe over the past two hundred years and bloody hell I never knew there had been so many! I was researching them so I could have more knowledge about the different borders of these countries when layering them and changing them for reworking the wire maps idea, looking at maybe changing them in terms of what would have happened if a certain war had ended differently. Because there were so many wars it was hard to think in terms of these when messing around with the different borders of the countries, in the end I knew it probably would come subconsciously anyway so I just started to mess around with the different shapes without thought. So I had drawn out the individual countries on aseotate in black marker and used a projector to really examine the effects of messing about with them and layering them. I decided to put up a large sheet of paper and draw out the projection onto them but once I did that I didn't know what to do with them. I liked them but they were so plain. I haven't really done anything with them since but I've been thinking of using them to do a print project i've just hit a bit of a wall with the european countries thing.

We started doing a sound seminar every week learning about soundscape and sound artists and sound equipment and it started giving me ideas about what I could do with the sound piece I had discussed with Mike. I'm a big follower of hurling and I thought it might be interesting to record the sound of the crowd of two bordering counties who were playing each other at a hurling match. I was thinking of having one person among one crowd of supporters and another among the other crowd recording what one said about the other or something like that I wasn't exactly sure of what I'd come out but I was excited about it. I was thinking that really its the closest thing you get to war among these two counties and people get very passionate when at these matches.

My artists statement

In my work I have chosen to explore boundaries. Under this vast theme I am, at the moment, looking into country borders involving in europe and county borders involving Ireland. I'm researching peoples feelings on where they live and the invisible but ever present borders around them and how they affect them. I'm exploring these themes in my work through sound and simple lines.

Ok so at this point it was after christmas I was getting feedback from my assessments which went well thankfully but I was told I should get more tutorials from other tutors-fine. But this became a kind of a problem because the more tutorials I got the more different ideas I had to work with and the more confused I got about what i was doing and where I was going with it all. One of the ideas I was working with were, from Mike (one of my tutors), to look into language and cultural issues and we started discussing county borders which I was already starting to look into. I talked about a conversation I had with my dad about where the kilkenny border ends and waterford begins which is actually very close to waterford city. Anyway we talked about doing a sound piece based on these kind of converastions and peoples feelings about where they live and their bordering county. One idea. Next I was speaking to Roisin, the drawing tutor, she suggested I explore the idea of the wire maps a bit more in maybe a different medium such as aseotate and marker which would be quick and easy as she felt that it wasn't easy to tell they were countries. She suggested to look a bit more at rivers and mountains which can sometimes be the outline of a border. After that I had a group crit where we spoke about the photos of the canteen and making it into a video, about maybe colour coding groups and about reserching tribes- associated values, power struggles, violence and collective mentalities. So it all got a bit confusing..the problem was that I loved all the ideas and suggestions mostly so I tried to take them all on and got into a bit of a muddle which I still feel like I haven't dragged myself out of yet.

I have found another idea that I should go back to which is making me realise how helpful doing out this blog has been, though I hope no one thinks bad of me for my obvious impatience and forgetfulness. So the idea was to give people a piece of chalk and get them to draw out their own country and to take a picture of it and amybe to make up their own laws etc. I wanted to see if people argued over places and how big the area would be, things which have started wars in the past. I will do this, I promise!

At this time i was looking at artists such as Magdalea Jetelova, Patrick Raynaud, Thomas Struth and Frank Thiel.