Credits:

Landscapes (2005). 13 minutes 34 seconds.

Concept: Mark Garry.

Cinematography: Myles Claffey.

Sound: Karl Burke.

Additional composition: Karl Burke.

Commissioned by the Dock Arts Centre.

This film is made up of eight scenes of three suspended transparent plastic sheets that are slowly moved by the wind within a forest in Sligo called Union Woods. The soundtrack was made up of a merging of field recordings of this forest and additional site specific compositions by Karl Burke. 

The generative process for this film began with a period of research.

Motivated by a perceived demise of interest in the Irish landscape or more specifically a perceived demise in a particular kind of associative connection to the Irish Landscape. I was interested in Irish mythology and legacies of Ireland’s Pre-Christian, pagan beliefs systems as they related to the formation or understanding of landscape. Examples included fairy forts or Raths, which are the remnants of Iron age - Bronze age dwellings known as Lios or Hill forts/Ring forts, that had deeply imbedded relationship to pre-Christian belief systems.

Rather than focus on a specific mythology or archaeological site, the work stemmed from an aspiration to view the Irish landscape more broadly as a place of possibility and wonder.

Prior to our filming Karl Burke had been commissioned by Sligo’s Arts office to make a sonic response to this forest. For two months Burke had used the forest as a studio, composing, generating and recording music within the forest. He used guitars and various pedals and small amplifiers and a number of sonic apparatus that he had devised such as tensioning cello strings between trees which he would amplify and play with a bow. Creating a soundtrack about the forest within the forest Burke’s work culminated in a performance within the forest. Burke took these new compositions and merged them with field recordings and digitally processed them to become the soundtrack for the film. Tonally and structurally this soundtrack is ambient in that it prioritises tone and atmosphere and lacks a defining time signature or structured melody. It moves slowly between, field recordings, tonally melancholic drones and textural layers and more complex discordance and occasional silence.