Tracy what, how, why

1.

The viewer enters a completely blackened room, as their eyes adjust they see the outline of four oval-shapes, each the approximate size of a human torso. Two parallel rows of two, facing each other. The linear shapes are made of light. As the viewer moves around the room the ovals come in and out of visibility. An awareness of how big or small this room is never becomes apparent, only how near or far the viewer is from the ovals that they can see. This work was viewable only for one winter evening.

The room had four windows to the street: two at the front and two at the back. For each window I constructed a large device to funnel the dim streetlight through linear oval shapes cut into sheets of plywood. The cuts in the wood were made at a sharp angle: so the light-bleed was lessened and so you couldn’t see directly through to the street. What was visible was only the floating oval line drawings and nothing because not enough light entered the room to illuminate any object in the space.

I soaked the four plywood sheets for a few days, weighting the centre so that each warped to a slight curve. I wonkily trimmed all of the edges of the wood so the sheets were no longer perfectly rectangular. Both of these things ended up not to be noticeable, and turned out to be only for my enjoyment.

The oval shapes reference tantric Shiva Linga painting: thickly painted dense black ovals, with a slip of colour leaking at its edge used as a tool to meditate by concentrating your stare at the oval. So using this device the ovals acted as portals: to stare at and be transported to elsewhere, activated by the act of looking. This is a forced act because in this space you have only really this one sense to guide you. I could say that the room acts as a site of disintegration, dissociation from your body and your mental transportation to another space but I wouldn’t want to be didactic but really I just wanted to make wonky ovals float in space.

2. A work made specifically for a monument room adjoining a church in Kilkenny Town. There were three components to the installation:

- A video of the moon filmed through an astronomical telescope was projected onto a broken piece of monument stone.

- I introduced a set of 11 rocks taken from a forest on the other side of Ireland into the room. A straight slice cut off a corner of each by making an obvious made-made flat surface. In the room already, laid on the floor, were carved pieces of monument stones from graves outside the building that I was not allowed to move. I cut the forest rocks so that they spoke the same language and could speak to the other stones.

- A video of a bridge sunken by a high tide caused by a super moon was projected onto a piece of torn tracing paper made to stand upright using metal armature wire.

Both videos loop continuously and are non-narrative (have no clear beginning or end).

This work talks about the relationship between very heavy bodies in the universe and the forces that connect them. It was made in reaction to the heavy immovable stones in the space and their geological descendancy.

3. A flat screen monitor is laid flat on the floor. It plays a video showing extreme close-up pans of paint flaking off walls and doors. Real paint flakes were laid on top of the screen.

It was filmed in an old house, during a residency and was shown in a group exhibition in the same space.

The texture of the filmed surface combine with the television set and flakes to make a sculptural object. There is an interaction between the flakes on the surface and the filmed surfaces – they become travelers in the space of the video. There is a deliberate ‘wrongness’ in how the footage is shot: shakiness, focusing in and out, etc – pointing to the materiality of the video.