Idirlinn, shifting silence
Rosie O'Reilly
Artist In Residence at UCD Parity Studios
Supported by UCD College of Science
Journeying through layers of mythology, local wisdom,
animism, blue humanities and ecophilosophy,
Rosie O' Reilly's work searches
for new and hybrid ways to
exist in 'the mesh' - a place of acknowledged ecocide
and climate chaos.
It asks us, how can we dissimagine
the inevitably of things
and form new layers of meaning,
in order to build
new worlds together?
thinking without words, 2022
Wattle, reed and rope, 330cm x 220cm
Etal Andan talks about silence as an absence in her book of poetry by the same name. I couldn’t get these words out of my head as I read Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse. He talks about the urgent need to give voice to those that are silenced on a planet in crisis. Who have we silenced and how can we shift them Idirlinn, so voices are heard? Silencing appears again and again as something to unknot through the materials in this exhibition. Textiles for example, so few early examples exist in the great history museums of swords and stones, but we know they predate those artefacts. Perhaps you are reading this standing under the reed arches. Another silenced material. Disintegrating and remerging in the great cycles of life as our species built shelters that said so much about our custom, culture and land relations. I’m lucky to have met the thatcher Kyran O’Grady who was so willing to share old wisdoms. I’m equally grateful to have journeyed through Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer while preparing for this show. She breathes wisdom into a world drowning in information ...It’s impossible not want to dive deeper.
shifting silence, 2022
Cuttlefishbone, plant epoxy & wood, 92cm x 88cm
In this work you are encountering a cuttlefish, (Cephlapod from Greek Head Foot) the great shapeshifter of the ocean, appearing as cast bones and as a window to view through. The ocean as an otherworldly sensorium has become a place, I dive into to shake up the bad habits of terrestrial thinking. It dazzles you and makes you think sideways. Cephalopods have always been that creature for me, we are separated by 600 million years but as our dimensions of consciousness expand it’s clear they are kin. The place they occupy in mythology nods to a time when people were deeply connected to and acknowledged the power of the more than human world. Read Rachel Carson The Sea and Us, Godfrey Smith Otherminds, The Octopus, the Sea and the origins of consciousness.
If you've ever held a cuttlefish bone you will recognise the dendritic patterns, the fingerprint or headfoot prints of the creature. In our terrestrial world our headfooted and feathered kin have been entangled in cages where the bones of these oceanic shapeshifters are left to sharpen the beaks of the feathered ones. A strange entanglement right! Niki Clayton’s research has pushed both corvids and cuttlefish to the forefront of sentience studies. Both kin time travel, communicating without our words and have better understanding of time and space than us. Yet increasingly we push them to the limits of survival. Read Dimensions of Animal Consciousness, Birch, Schnell, Clayton.