TIM FEENEY

Dowsing / Collóireacht, 2025

Image and sound by Tim Feeney

Information kit

Narrative

Ten repetitive sonic interventions within the eroded landscapes of the Burren, County Clare, Ireland.

These occur at sites of local “anti-monuments:” a kilometers-long, natural limestone pavement high above Galway Bay; stone farm walls and remnants of circular structures on hillsides; cairns near a shoreline; a field of glacial boulders interrupted by a road smashed from the surrounding stone formations, in forced public work by the starving during the Great Hunger of 1845 to 1852. These structures speak to both the passage of geologic time, and the care and efforts of human survival beginning in the Neolithic period and tended through the present, though local history at each site may be lost, or unrecorded.

These are introduced in title cards in English, italicized as would be a term in a language foreign to the observer, and in Irish in plain font, as would be in an observer’s native language.

From one perspective, a sonic divining or physical research into the properties of land, space, light, and time in these locations; from another, an attempt as an “Irish-American” to reckon with language, archaeology, and history felt as formative but inarticulable without lived context.

After a point, you can only ask the stone so many questions, and sometimes you can only hear your own voice in response.

Option 1: Film screening

Version A

Single screen, 2.39x1

Stereo or 3.1 sound

1h 38m 30s

Image via theater projection screen, flat-screen monitor, or projected on any available surface. Sound via any available theatrical system, or configured to available gallery speakers.

Version B

Double screen, 2.39x1

Stereo, 3.1, or 4-channel sound

46m

Image via flat-screen monitors, or projected on any available surface, with channels next to one another on a single wall, or on adjacent walls bounded by one corner. Sound via any available theatrical system, or configured to available gallery speakers.

Option 2: Gallery installation, looping

One to ten screens or projection surfaces, as available and in in any spatial configuration.

2.39x1 if projected; 16x9 if displayed on multiple tablets or flat-screen monitors. Sound configurable for available sound system, or any number of speakers or headphones at each projection.