The eighth Burren Annual exhibition opens on Saturday at the Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan, Co Clare. Curated by Josephine Kelliher, the event features a collaborative project from artist Marie Hanlon and composer Rhona Clarke linking the visual arts and music. The exhibition features both individual and collective pieces, prompted by and developed in response to the unique environment of the Burren.
Visual media and music are juxtaposed and balanced, each inspired by the same location. Although not all pieces are collaborative, there is a cohesion that is central to the exhibition and a strong dialogue between sound and image. A video work entitled Relic, is the result of close collaboration by both artists. The piece draws its visual material directly from the topography of the Burren. Initially sequences appear unconnected, but as the film progresses a pattern of cycles emerges: the cycle of the tides, the cycle of the seasons and ultimately the cycle of life and death. From this stark terrain a narrative is constructed, mainly through the use of detail and close-up. Images of rocks, pools and vegetation give way to rusting debris, alluding to both the passing of time and the human presence in the landscape.
In the main gallery, Rhona Clarke shows three sound works, presented as individual pieces, to be experienced independently, intimately and in no particular sequence. As in the video, the raw material for these pieces was generated mainly by percussion instruments and then manipulated electronically. Clock-like wooden sounds and continuous motion are played out in simple lines. The works address time and space and in this sense provoke associations with the natural environment whilst also reflecting the linear nature of the drawings. The sounds have a textural affinity with the parched Burren limestone, but electronic sounds have replaced the ambient noises of nature.
Marie Hanlon’s drawings take their lines from the unexpected as well as the obvious places: wire, wood, water and fissured stones shaped over millennia. Visual referencing of hidden detail results in abstract as well as representational pieces. The palette is monochromatic and the style is at once both formal and free. This is an interpretation of place that will challenge the viewer’s perception. Hanlon also appropriates some found elements in this exhibition, honest quotations from the source, which manage to be both commonplace and exotic.
The dialogical aesthetic formed from the merging of sound and visual disciplines opens a discourse that questions the possible and supports the autonomous work. Exploring the same terrain by different means and experiencing the work in synchrony generates a new dimension. The work acknowledges its location, and draws upon the Burren’s ecosystem, contradictions and mysteries. It accurately conveys the largely unchanging features, despite the minutiae of natural and manmade alterations imposed over time and the silently shifting temporal nature of the panorama.
