short film and performance
Starting in 2019, we have been experimenting with constructing an alternative narrative identity for Ireland and the Irish diaspora.
I don't believe in ‘isms’, I just believe in me, is a directors' commentary performance delivered alongside the short film In a Contrary Place, detailing our own stories of complacency and complicity in relation to the Irish State and America, ending in a karaoke-style rendition of an original song that follows an absurd epic journey.
Together these works comprise a series of cautionary tales set against the dominant myths we are led to believe about ourselves and our homeland.
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Pictured:
- Corleck Head, still image from In a Contrary Place, 2022
- performance at the Yeats Society building, Sligo Cairde Arts Festival, and the Top of the Town pub, Askeaton Contemporary Arts’ Welcome to the Neighbourhood programme, both 2022.
- performance at the Moss Arts Centre, Blacksburg, Virginia, 2024.
- Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty in conversation with Dr. Ben Knapp at Virginia Tech Institute for Creativity and Technology, 2024 (two images).
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touring performance:
Askeaton Contemporary Arts, Welcome to the Neighbourhood, Co. Limerick, 2022
Sligo Cairde Arts Festival, 2022
Solas Nua, offsite at Madhatter bar and nightclub, Washington D.C., 2024
New Music + Technology Festival, Virginia Tech / Moss Arts Centre, 2024
Losing Track
6’ 33” video and snug-story-telling fan fiction
Residency and presentation at Askeaton Contemporary Arts: Welcome to the Neighbourhood
curated by Michele Horrigan
During our two weeks in Askeaton, we took the local train station and disused railway as a starting point to consider a limited world of compartments, all bound to a strict schedule. For this, we investigated the long-standing use of trains in storytelling and film, the Shannon-Foynes Port Company ‘VISION 2041’ development plan (that would see the line reopened to freight from Panamax vessels) as well as local legends and attractions including the Flying Boat Museum at the end of the line in Foynes.
Our visit culminated in a small body of work titled Losing Track, comprising a fanfiction account of actor Kiefer Sutherland's fateful visit to the town of Askeaton and beyond in 1992 and an accompanying video piece. We recited this story in unison, as an apparent train of thought, to one or two visitors at a time in a tiny local pub snug. Meanwhile, the video loop played in the adjacent bar, telling the same story of false idols, touristic fatigue and the threat of progress—through scenery alone.
In 2022 this piece was adapted into a short video for the ‘Only in Askeaton’ media channel, with a score and subtitles, following the rhythm of our voices as we told the story.
This engagement was the first part of an ongoing research project along the Western Rail Corridor in the West of Ireland.
offsite gathering at Black Mountain, Belfast
Valentine’s Day 2014
and digital radio station
as part of An Active Encounter,
curated by Ciara Hickey
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essay by Ciara Hickey
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’An Active Encounter’ at PS² Belfast combined events, interventions and discussions around Tamás St. Turba's Czechoslovak Radio 1968. The work consists of a red building brick with chalk markings drawn onto the sides denoting the dials of a radio. When Czechoslovakia was invaded by the Soviet army in 1968, people resisted through creative means. After people were forbidden to listen to radio broadcasts, they started attaching antennas to bricks as a sign of protest. These fake radios spread among the population who pretended to listen to them, and although they were useless as a communication device, they were continuously confiscated by the Russian Army.
We experimented in raising both conscious and subconscious awareness of the brick/radio at PS² through tactics of disorientation, interference, listening, clue-placement, allusion, misdirection and ‘going widdershins’. The work culminated in a Czechoslovak Radio 1968 fan club meeting which took place on Valentine’s day at 3pm, starting in the gallery and traveling to a secret location. We also ran an internet radio station between the 10th and 14th of February which explored our meditations and research on the brick/radio through readings, noise music, storytelling and archival recordings. Research material was presented by a range of voices, from north and south of the border, including the following music and texts:
Samuel Beckett's ‘Text for Nothing #8’ (1950-52); Baltic Revolution folk and pop songs from 1980s Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia; mvestle and Ellll, noise music from Cork (2014+); The International Parallel Union of Telecommunications Manifesto (Hungary, 1968); Timothy Leary's 1973 Starseed Communication; Henry Flynt's 1980s experimental music; Michel Serres' Parasite parables (1980); the theory of the refrain from ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980); Robert Smithson's 1968 ‘Theory of Nonsites’; Nikola Tesla's 1900 ‘Problem of Increasing Human Energy’; chapter 2 of ‘The Little Prince’ by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943; George Orwell's 1984 radio adaptation, 1953; 1970s fluxus letters from Ray Johnson; Emma Goldman for Mother Earth magazine, 1906; the Ancient Greek Katabasis myth, and John Cage's short stories as well as his 1961 ‘Lecture on Silence’ and 1967 ‘A Year From Monday‘.
The earnest attention directed by the citizens of Prague towards the brick radios they made according to Tamás St. Turba’s instruction: ‘cover a brick in newspaper and listen to it on the street’, bestowed these mute devices with a powerful recalcitrance as protest objects, their withdrawn silence becoming like a shared code amongst listeners. However, the radio brick is a potent entity independently of this energy invested in it. It seems to hover between two states, not-quite-brick and not-quite-radio; sometimes an ex-brick turned radio and sometimes a brick which, once decommissioned, has only a dim memory of being a radio, its sulphurous markings the only trace of its former existence. This mysterious dimension reflects perhaps the strange space opened up by metaphor and allusion in which things bump against each other, hinting at their remote realities. The shuttling back and forth between brick/radio and radio/brick causes it to become ontologically destabilised as well as estranged from the world and itself. And, as an artwork it demonstrates a moment in which, through the contemplation of an object, the world becomes unfamiliar; somehow resistant yet emitting enough faint noise to keep us listening.
The Bucking Fastard
in-unison performance, August 2014
Foaming at the Mouth 3, visual art spoken word
Stag’s Head, Dublin
A 5 minute story based on a 2 hour interview with Werner Herzog where he describes a pair of inseparable twins who speak in unison, told simultaneously.
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I am fit and well and at last come into my own
Foaming at the Mouth 6, Mazreb, Amsterdam, July 2015
& 'Effort', Dada Post, Berlin, 2017
A 15 minute in-unison performance, later reprised as a remote telepathic recital and banner-making exercise.
The true story of a set of twins who hate each other with a vicious passion but who also can't bear to be apart from one another.
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Update:
In Summer 2025, Werner Herzog travelled to Dublin and Sligo in Ireland in order to finally make his film, ‘The Bucking Fastard’. Through a network of friends and film-workers, we sent him the following fan letter while he was in Ireland (pictured left) We are patiently awaiting a response.
30 minute artists’ talk and slide-show
Publication Scaffold, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios’ Dublin Art Book Fair (DABF2019)
November 2019
Curated by Michele Horrigan, Sean Lynch and Jo Melvin.
This talk was a presentation of our ongoing research project along the Great Western Railway. Here, we present our processes through a story-telling exercise, using an abandoned railway line as a channel for exploring popular visions of ‘The West’, as a frontier in both Irish and Irish-American imaginations. Taking our own bodies and the abandoned railway as a starting point, we set off on a walking pilgrimage in easter 2019, connecting two points once made proximate by the train line: Collooney Train Station in suburban Sligo and Colbert Station in Limerick City.
Paradoxically associated with exile and escape, remote beauty and hostile nature, the idea of going west is intrinsic to the Irish historical narrative, from plantation to emigration and early American settlement. A doubling back is enacted both through Irish fascination with US culture, e.g. the phenomenal success of Country & Irish music, as well as the Irish-American ‘return home’, as epitomised in films such as John Ford’s ‘The Quiet Man’ (1952). For this presentation, we aim to capture a sense of fragmented yet intertwined identities on each side of the Atlantic.
This piece uses slide-show photographs, graphics, illustrations, sound and video clips to follow a satirical impression of our own journey west. In one anecdote, the Knock apparition is retold as a modern-day extraterrestrial event, prompting an alternative pilgrimage. In another, two special interest groups hold polarising views on the impact of rural electrification on the filming of ‘The Quiet Man’.
Excerpts from this performance are included in the Publication Scaffold Podcast, broadcast on Dublin Digital Radio on 27 March.
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Slides (clockwise from top left above):
Literal Enlightenment of the People of the Remote Irish Countryside: an Appreciation and Networking Society - logo
It was me Murph, Interstellar (2014) - still
Knock model village c.1879 - promotional video screen shot
Fermi’s Paradox - neon sign render
Great Western Railway (somewhere near Swinford) - photograph
Society for the Acknowledgement of Hollywood's Troubles with Irish Rural Electrification - logo
Bord na Móna - imagined RTÉ news segment
Kiltimagh town sculpture - photograph
Sundial - notebook drawing
performance and installation at Red Rock beach, Sutton
April 2013
initiated with Richard Proffitt
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Images from Pink Moon were included in Paper Visual Art Journal: Dublin (Volume 5) alongside a short text entitled Marconigrams. These were also exhibited at ‘The Earth Rings in Your Ears’, Eight Gallery, 2013.
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Wishing You a Relatively Safe Trip
response by Rob Murphy
"Thinking about the work today and last night, it was really perfect. I don't know what your exact hopes for it were but it was exciting and depressing and ended horror-funny.
The entire lead up really worked, everyone on the bus was glued to the window and arguing over numbers of stops so it felt like a summer project trip as a kid or some crap cheapo tourist non-adventure. The 'indecision' in direction from Niamh was annoying in a good way. The raft was one of the most underwhelming things I've ever experienced. It was brilliant. Like a properly shit self discovery oneness with nothing but a wet arse and glow-sticks. That whole movement in art at the moment to imbue objects with timeless knowledge and mysticism was well and truly smashed by the raft experience. It was that idea that you are having some transitional moment at once, then realising that you are pathetically close to the shore, held by a concerned minder and being stared at by all your mates who are queuing up for some 'mosneytrip'.
I felt properly stupid and it made me laugh so much while on the raft. Really relatively safe and depressing. The absence of you Ruth was also effective. I felt like I was being monitored from afar on my experience and it gave it a real sinister feeling that I was being used in a new age experiment by some pseudo hippy psychologist loser with a smelly herbal tea stained jumper.
The whole thing was un-life affirming and hilarious, which was very sad."
residency and site-responsive performance
as part of The Joinery Graduate Residency Series: Experiments in Sound
November 2012
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press release:
During this residency, Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty will investigate two of Dublin’s underground rivers: the Oxmantown Stream and the River Bradoge. Two related pieces will explore the concept of resonant events being recorded and subsequently replayed near areas of water, using different methods of subtitling to mediate between the city’s hidden streams and the audience as a potentially unreliable narrator. Moriarty and Clinton will endeavour to resurrect the submerged and muted rivers, conducting an intimate tour along these secret waterways. The aural subtitles of the walk will be complemented by an installation in the Joinery that will use visual cues from the text of the walking tour. The two works will connect the gallery and the city and emphasise the physical and historical depth of place through evocative sound. Subtitles become a narrative stream of consciousness, emphasising the silence of the buried rivers.
Up through the wather your secret rises;
The stones won’t keep it, and it lifts the mould,
An’ it tracks your footsteps, and yoar fun surprises
An’ it sits at the fire beside you black and cowld
- Sheridan Le Fanu, The House by the Churchyard
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Night walks took place on Thursday 15 November and day walks on Sunday 18 November. The performance lasted approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes.
hand-made song book, walkie-talkie, semaphore & singing performance
May 2012
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The culmination of a week-long residency at Portsalon, Donegal, this headland performance, transmission and limited edition booklet followed an epic nonsense verse song, in which female characters Apollo and Dionysus are transported to the sea above the sky.
Resort was a ten day long residency initiated by John Ryan and Tom Watt in 2012. The project was undertaken by thirteen artists and ended with a site specific exhibition along a cliff path, beach and woodland at Ballymastocker Bay, Portsalon, Donegal.
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Excerpt from response by Jack Nyhan, 2012:
“Static laced sounds carried in the air from a walkie-talkie lodged in a can by the wayside. Rounding a craggy bend I found Ruth Clinton singing into the receiver on a rocky terrace a little below the level of the trail. On an adjacent spur of rock Niamh Moriarty signaled back with pennant flags. Together they performed the Lament for Portsalon. Much of the meaning of this work was left to hover in its own ambivalence, contained in the media of invisible radio waves and unfamiliar songs. The pages of the Laments were scrawled with drawings of flag positions and verses, mirroring Moriartys’ gestures:
Along the narrow path above,
In careful thought strayed Apollo there
‘It’s a sky beneath the sea’ she said
‘And a sea that floats up in the air.’
Then fragments of the mournful song
Came echoing across the land:
‘What of the severed seagull’s wing
That once caressed the glistening strand?’”
