I explore more-than-human presences through drawing, movement, and moving image. I work at a reservoir site in West Cork, where each winter water drains away exposing the lake floor. The place becomes a shifting, disorienting ground where soil, stone, water, and air feel palpably animate. The intelligences I encounter are not supernatural but inherent in their embodied presences in the world and they bring me in contact with something radically other, even alien.I use my human body to sense and communicate, entering into fields of animacy to experience the world from the perspective of the Other. Through drawing and movement, I allow my body to contain and mimic movements beyond language and rational intention. It becomes a relational exchange, where perception is mutual and meaning emerges through encounter. The moving image lets me explore and communicate temporal aspects of these encounters. Working on site, I am drawn away from my habitual senses of time and place and their familiar boundaries. I seek to move past narratives that position the natural world either as a resource or as something to be protected by and for human people. Instead, I seek to represent a shared relational field without distinctions of mind and body, human and non-human and I sense that perhaps these others are just as curious about us as we are about them.
