Hugh Lane Gallery Presents: The Sea Inside Us and Last Things
In partnership with Hugh Lane Gallery, we are delighted to present the premiere screening of The Sea Inside Us, by Ruth E. Lyons and Colm Hogan (23 minutes); and Last Things by Deborah Stratman (50 minutes).
This film programme, curated by Alice Butler, is part of Hugh Lane Gallery’s Explore & Learn Citywide programming during their refurbishment period and temporary closure as part of the Parnell Square Cultural Quarter project.
The screening will be introduced by Alice Butler, who will also mediate a post-screening Q+A with artist Ruth Lyons.
The Sea Inside Us:
What is food without salt? Food without flavour? Life without emotion?
There is the remains of an ancient ocean under the countries of northern Europe, a bed of salt that extends from Ireland to Russia. For 10 years Lyons has been tracing this seam making carvings from rock salt of various colours. The film follows the artist into mines 300 metres underground, and across the snow- capped peaks of vast mountain ranges. Against these epic backdrops salt becomes a prism through which she formulates questions that fathom the unknowable while reaching for the eternal. The film is shot in sites of salt production in Northern Ireland, Switzerland and Sicily and at the artist’s coastal home in the west of Ireland.
Last Things:
What happens to us / Is irrelevant to the world’s geology / But what happens to the world’s geology / is not irrelevant to us. – Hugh MacDiarmid
From before the beginning until after the end; evolution and extinction as told through the prism of minerals. The geo-biosphere is introduced as a place of evolutionary possibility, where humans disappear but life endures.