GOMA, Waterford, January 2025. As part of f-project Re-Action exhibition.
Falling in Grace / Rising in Matter
Two-channel Super 8 video installation, 6 min
Ocean-weathered window pane, lith prints, found dress
Film by Artem Trofimenko
Performance and installation support: Awen
“The ocean at your door, going to the the sea — let it come to you, drawing a fabric to contain the spilling wave, they break over the porch where a fish enters, a silver fish with large tail, you know it is inside now, and it roams under your dress, the conditions are right, this is no longer the world that once had you by the throat grasping for breath…”
There is another world but it is in this one.
-Paul Éluard
Falling in Grace / Rising Matter emerges from a period of transition, moving between landscapes on the west coast of the United States—Redwood, Oregon, Mount Shasta—and the west coast of Clare, Kilbaha. Developed with the support of the Agility Award 2024, the work traces a passage through shifting states of perception, where the symbolic is invoked, then released, leaving behind a residual charge.
A dress is carried across these sites, filmed in varying conditions—held, submerged, displaced—before being lost to the sea, taken by white foam. Its absence initiates a substitution: a window pane, a surface of translucency recalls an earlier work “Broken windows whistle with reverie”. In the search for the lost dress, a minke whale surfaces briefly—an encounter that reorients the field, marking the moment where the object gives way to a different order of presence.
The work is grounded in material processes. Film emulsion, developed in mentorship with Michael Higgins, undergoes high-temperature bleach reversal, causing the surface to rupture and bloom—forming star-like constellations within the image. These transformations recall instability in the process itself, aligning the material behaviour of the film with the experiential conditions of the work.
Further layers emerge through the use of rosemary as an alternative photographic developer. Historically associated with remembrance, purification, and funerary rites, rosemary operates here as both chemical agent and symbolic carrier. The act of development becomes a form of retrieval—latent images surfacing alongside submerged histories and sensory traces. The scent remains embedded in the material, extending the image beyond the visual into a field of touch and memory.
Across these processes, the work attends to the sensation of falling—an encounter with instability, trust, and surrender. The body, the wood, the surface of the sea: each becomes a site of contact, where image and matter are held in a continuous state of transition. Meaning does not settle, but gathers in fleeting convergences, where the visible and the latent briefly align before dispersing again.