Dowsing / Collóireacht, 2025
Single-channel video, 2.39x1, stereo sound, 1:38:30
Two-channel video or projection, 16x9, stereo sound, 46:00
One- or several-channel video installation, 16x9, multichannel sound, looping
Synopsis
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.
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Screenings and exhibitions
Split Film Festival, Croatia, installation, September 12-16, 2025
Digital Arts Zurich, honorable mention, October 2025
Skin in the Game, Millennium Film Workshop, New York, installation, October 24-25, 2025
Revolutions per Minute Festival, Boston, two-screen projection, December 6, 2025
Brussels Independent Film Festival, Brussels, streaming, February 2-28, 2026
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