“Life on Land” 2018 Platform Arts Belfast. 

Mudskippers are amphibious fish. They can walk on land by using their fins, and have panoramic sight through eyes mounted high on their heads. They spend most of their time out of water, on a shoreline or clinging to rocks. There they remain motionless for hours, perhaps in the act of contemplation while perceiving the world around them.

Life on Land is a body of work that was presented at Platform Arts in Belfast, Northern Ireland, June 2018. This solo exhibition comprised of large-scale prints, exhibited with mudskipper fish as a living nucleus to the install. The work addressed the phenomenology of space and perception, studied through the photographic medium.

A series of 54x44 inch seascapes appear to float from the walls, a glass tank with a crafted shoreline is placed at the centre inhabited by four mudskippers, daylight washes over the space through six windows placed on one wall, one of which is coloured tungsten shining a block of contrasted light panning over the space as the day rolls on. Occasionally the sound of fins skipping over shallow waters from the mudskippers movements breaks the silence  and so defuses the mudskippers space throughout the gallery.

A consideration of the space between objects and perception itself is the point of departure with this work. The viewer is asked to question what is lost or misunderstood in the act of perception. Through the addition of incongruous physical space within the camera apparatus during the photographic process, these photographs have lost their detail and miscommunicated their subject, the sea. Yet, what is produced is an image not entirely dissimilar to what we may perceive as the sea, in a sense perhaps captured is a certain essence of it, as if distilled down to it prototypical components. While lacking in details an impression is communicated, information is still provided.

A theme of subjective perception runs through the work and is addressed by considering the space between two perceiving bodies, conscious or otherwise. The visitor is tasked with considering their perception of the sea parallelled against the camera’s suggestion of it. At the same time, they are asked to consider the mudskipper’s perception of the world around them parallelled against their own. The space between two perceiving bodies can never be overcome; the same position will never be achieved simultaneously, as we cannot enter into each others’ being, and so the path of perception from object to perceiving body will always be different. It will always be subjective.

Through the mudskippers constant and inevitable perception of their surroundings they carry a function of sustaining the existence of the show by keeping a perception of the space active in their consciousness. Once a visitor enters the space they join in the act of perception with the fish. Underpinning perception itself as an object being exhibited but of course individual and unique to each visitor.

The work is accompanied by two commissioned texts by Dr Francis Halsall, Co-Director of the Masters Program: Art in the Contemporary World at NCAD in Dublin and Dr Ruby Wallis, lecturer at Burren College of Art BA & MFA programs in Galway. These texts will expand on theoretical concerns embedded within this project and will be paired with a photographic study of a single rock illustrating various phenomenological thought processes.