In a Blink of My Ear

Through practice-led research of critical theory, tackling the climate crisis in the epoch of the Anthropocene, I use documentary media that record images and sound to explore ontologies and poetics of the moment. Collecting natural sounds and artefacts to create a phenomenology of recent history. I draw on technology and the literature of Donna Haraway and Walter Benjamin.

Benjamin's text Destructive Character presents us with a series of traits belonging to the essential destroyer of things; thus, a restoring open space allows new paths to form that leads us through the rubble.

| The destructive character sees nothing. But for this very reason, he/ she sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there too, he/she sees a way.

- Walter Benjamin

My artistic research reflects spaces throughout the native woodlands of West Cork, Ireland, which are the sites of construction, destruction, decay, static, noise and silence. My aim is to privilege voices that have been lost through the official oppressive course of climate change. And where the destructive character of humans can be linked with the destructive character of nature itself.

In my artwork, the environment is perceived as a sound in visual form.

I created a six-channel sound piece from the collected sound, which I converted into a visual form. Visualised sound is playing inside an organic sculpture helmet, made out of willow bark (retina sound device)

I am driven by Donna Haraway's questions in' How to live well on a vulnerable planet that is not yet murdered. She suggests the emergence of a new period within the Anthropocene where refugees from environmental disasters, both human and non-human, will come together, it is a time when humans will try to live in balance and harmony with nature.