Installation shot of people sitting under the moon of ‘continuance’ in the Planetarium at BlueDot Festival 2017
http://www.discoverthebluedot.com/
Image courtesy of Lumen Studios
continuance, video stills, 2017.
A winner of the Trinity Creative Challenge Award 2016/17, continuance was produced in collaboration with Joseph Keane, Professor in Respiratory Medicine, Trinity College Dublin; Emer Hackett, PhD Fellow, School of Biochemistry & Immunology, Trinity College Dublin; and Rachael Dease (AU), music and sound design.
In 1959, Clare’s Grandfather was diagnosed with TB and kept in isolation for more than 12 months. Today, Mycobacterium tuberculosis is the world’s most lethal bacterium causing over 1 million deaths per annum.
continuance connects cells of our being to a celestial body used to determine time, merging images from a microscope with images from a telescope. Earths constant companion, the Moon, reflects sunlight into our darkness and this work depicting lunar phases and tuberculosis cells in culture reflects on the period of isolation endured by Clare’s Grandfather. Sound artist Rachael Dease scored the work and created the sound design utilising pulses, tones, frequencies, and breaths echoing a struggle for air. Rachael included a vocal response to a letter kept by Clare’s Grandfather from one of his young children; words that repeat and come through like memories or dreams “now come home for Christmas to us please”.
continuance (today was longer), video stills, 2017.
As the world outside breathes, a rotating camera captures ‘light trails’ and orbiting details mimicking Earth’s rotation within still spaces of a deserted hospital. Earth’s rotation is slowing slightly with time due to the tidal effects the Moon has on Earth; so, a day was shorter in the past. Atomic clocks show that a modern day is longer by about 1.7 milliseconds than a century ago. Reflecting on this idea and how isolation affects our experience of time, the camera rotations gradually slow to a final still image. This work is intended to be shown adjacent to ‘continuance’, where Rachael Dease’s voice and sound design from the moon installation leaks into and haunts the space of this work.
In 1959 my grandfather, Patrick O’Sullivan, was diagnosed with tuberculosis and kept in isolation for over 12 months. At that time, he and my grandmother had five young children who waited for his return. My mother Breda, the eldest, was 8 years old. My aunt Marie, aged just 6, wrote him this letter which he kept safely in his prayer book until the day he died 20 years later. He annotated her letter with his own words “My permanent reminder of where I should be always.” and on the back, “a small letter from a small girl but it broke the four men who saw it. P. - Xmas ‘59″
Thank you Marie for lending me your lovely letter for this project x
