Learning to Swim with the ESB, 2015. Spalted Beech, PVC, water. Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Ire.
Amphibious Sound, 2012. Neoprene wetsuit material.
Stormglass, 2015. Glass, Stainless steel, crystalline chemical solution, wall text.
The Sea, The Sea
2015 / Solo Show, Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Ire
There is a geological seam of salt deep in the earth that stretches from Ireland to Russia, it is the remains of the Zechstein Sea, a body of water that became landlocked around two hundred and thirty million years ago. A company called Irish Salt Mining and Exploration has been mining de-icing rock salt from the Zechstein Sea at its Kilroot Mine near Carrickfergus since 1965. Over half a million tonnes of de-icing rock salt have been produced per annum. In The Sea, The Sea, Ruth E. Lyons presents works that explore how the landscape of Ireland has been altered by industry, in particular the industries of mining and energy production.
Zechstein - Antrim (Ire) uses salt from the Carrickfergus mine. It is extracted from the mine in a solid form. Here we see it in that unfamiliar form, repurposed into bowls. The familiarity of the bowl and common place substance of salt when seen together allow the fascination to be in the substance; the salt. The salt that was formed 230 million years ago in a sea that is now no more.
Stormglass is based on a Victorian barometer of the same name. Changes in the chemical solution within the sealed container are thought to predict the weather. Vice Admiral Robert FitzRoy (1805-1865) as the Meteorological Statist To The Board of Trade had stormglasses placed in British fishing villages in 1859, so that the fishermen might stay in port when a storm was brewing, which saved lives and made him a hero among fishermen.
Learning to Swim with the ESB was born out of an encounter that the artist had with the eerie landscape of the Gearagh in the Lee Valley (an area felled by the ESB in their development of the Iniscarra Dam as part of the Lee Valley Hydroelectric scheme) where the dark stumps of dead oak trees stick out of the water as a ghostly reminder of the alluvial forest that once stood there.
The work looks back and outwards to the massive social turning point that greater society underwent in the 1920s with the advent of widespread electrification. Prior to this water was an important source of energy, electricity replaced water as the element that would be globally encountered. The work sets out to comment on the radical upheaval that this development has affected on society, from the multifarious benefits of electricity to the punctuation of landscape by pylons and the increasingly pertinent issue of flooding. Learning to Swim with the ESB is constructed from spalted beech which was milled by Mark Donnelley and comes from two wind-felled trees on the lands of Blarney Castle.
Water, which we use everyday, which surrounds us as Island dwellers, when looked at in a different way fascinates and tells us stories about the world we live in. Furthermore, somewhere in outer space astronomers have detected the largest body of water in the universe whose volume is enough to fill the earth’s oceans more than one hundred trillion times. The Sea, The Sea, is a meditation on the ordinary world of little things in a vast and unfathomable universe. Ruth E. Lyons engages the viewer in thoughts, proposals and propositions around water, its use, mis-use and its influence and contribution to life on an island.
Gallery text by Emma O’Dwyer
