compass

This work originated out of a repetitive ritual, rooted in the conditions of lockdown. I sought solace in the sea, and within the process of daily attunements, sprouted the beginnings of this project. I collected images, sounds, sediment and words from the Dublin coastline in an exploration of site and sefhood: the residue of which leaks throughout this text. The form you will find here is unstable and fluid, a flowing body. A swell of words.

In the midst of the project, I moved away from these places and the work moved along with me. We both became unmoored from the source, finding ourselves in processes of motion and flux. The lines along which I’d been living and the patterns of repetition that I had carved left traces along the way. Traces that the text followed, circled around and diverged from. The body of work here consists of careful considerations around a set of terms. The terms included are interlaced, relational and associative. They form an environment that is intra-active and contaminated; the words ooze through one another, depending on each other to exist and to be understood. Embracing multiplicity, the terms resist clustering and linearity. Composed in a non-hierarchical wave, this work invites exploration and choice. It can be dipped in and out of, flowed through or immersed within. It calls for a diffractive and elastic reading. I encourage you to get lost in its terrain.

“In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.” - Solnit on Benjamin

I am following lines. Layered lines of memory, speculation, attunement and text. Along these lines, I have needed multiple modes of thought; rhizomatic, sympoetic, diffractive and tentacular. The work of Donna Haraway, particularly, has provided a key touchstone in helping me to think through these messy ideas of embodiment, ontology and materiality. A host of other theorists such as Karen Barad, Tim Ingold, Anna Tsing, Kathleen Stewart and Peggy Phelan have also significantly contributed to my thinking around these concepts: speaking to such a variety of different topics, from performativity to mushrooms, the uncontained and muddy nature of this work can be illustrated by the range of sources it is influenced by.

I have followed the forces and flows of material that brought the form of this work into being. Occupying spaces of tension, the project struggles between erasure and disclosure, actuality and textuality, connectedness and detachment. An echo by definition is a bodiless voice. This project is an echo that resounds through multiple bodies. Along the way, I have taken wrong turns and made mistakes, at times, drowning in the material. It has been a practice in fluctuating and failing, a lesson in listening. I have struggled through the entangled lines and present to you a close attention held in place by the gravity of my body. The text is eroded, leaky and affective; it pools in certain places, held, in others seeping through cracks and fissures. Other parts are drained entirely, defined by their absence. Words may drift across the page in the voices of others. It is viscous and porous.

Welcome.