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SIRIUS ARTS CENTRE: Aoife Desmond, sirius – harbour’s mouth

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Aoife Desmond is a Cork City-based artist whose practice spans film, installation, and performance. Her work explores the relationship between humans and nature, particularly the connection between body and landscape, through the lens of feminism, geography, and memory. The film sirius – harbour’s mouth portrays a woman (the artist herself) dressed in ‘blue collar’–style clothing, executing improvised gestures in an old, empty room, an adjacent balcony, and the nearby quay. It meditates upon architecture, history, and place through a performative engagement with the SIRIUS building and its environs.sirius – harbour’s mouth was commissioned by SIRIUS. This exhibition is produced by SIRIUS and curated by Miguel Amado, director.
Aoife Desmond, sirius – harbour’s mouth (still), 2023. Courtesy of the artist
Aoife Desmond’s films are place-based, involving research into specific sites and contexts, and their narratives take both diaristic and essayistic forms. The artist often uses Super 8mm and 16mm film, engaging with the ‘archaic’ aspects of film as both a technology and a medium. This approach shapes an aesthetics that mixes characteristics of ‘structural’ film with a poetics emerging from lived experience.

sirius – harbour’s mouth portrays a woman (the artist herself) dressed in ‘blue collar’–style clothing, executing improvised gestures in an old, empty room – moving her body in repetitive ways, writing with chalk on the floor, staring at the sun through a window – as well as looking the River Lee from an adjacent balcony and walking on the quay steps, getting her feet wet. The woman seems to merge with the space, and we are drawn to the blending of her movements and the light, which produces a choreography all its own.

The performance unfolds contemplatively, suggesting a mystical approach to architecture and the elements, particularly water, as well as expressing an interest in solar activity, which points towards ancestral knowledges. In this, it contrasts with the intense pace of the surrounding landscape and built environment, dominated as they are by tourism and naval activity.

The cinematography takes advantage of the qualities of 16mm film. Solarisations at the beginning and end of each ‘reel’ ease us in and out of key scenes, and flash cuts suggest that what we see of the performer’s improvisations is limited and fragmentary. The audio track combines intimate live sounds from the performance with ambient sounds from the street and the River Lee, enhancing the sense of place and emphasising the connections between the performer and the locations she inhabits.

Cobh is a town shaped by its industrial, military and colonial past, and it has served as a point of departure for many Irish who have been forced to emigrate. The SIRIUS building was originally constructed for the Anglo-Irish elite, and today still represents power relations in Ireland. Desmond’s work offers an embodied interpretation of the SIRIUS building, referring to its complex, layered histories, which intersect with those of Cobh.
Aoife Desmond, sirius – harbour’s mouth (still), 2023. Courtesy of the artist
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