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Displaying items by tag: Crawford Art Gallery

A lost coastal sound will return to echo through Cork city centre for one day this January.

Found Sound (Lost at Sea) 11.1.11 is an installation by sound artist Danny McCarthy which, on Thursday 11 January, will resonate across Emmet Place outside Crawford Art Gallery and infiltrate the surrounding soundscapes of Cork.

The performance of this unique sound work commemorates the 13th anniversary of the last foghorn sounding from lighthouses along the Irish coast when they ceased on 11 January 2011.

Found Sound (Lost at Sea) 11.1.11 was created as a result of McCarthy’s interest in acoustic ecology.

The sound installation will be audible intermittently throughout the day and serves as a reminder of what was once an imperative soundtrack to daily life.

McCarthy’s work, which joined the National Collection in 2020, is unique to Crawford Art Gallery’s context. The gallery was originally built in 1724 as Cork’s Custom House and the sound work recalls its ties to the city’s commercial success, since the 18th century, as a significant port for commerce, migration, and defence.

Cork Harbour also lays claim to being one of the largest natural navigable harbours in the world and, as the city’s motto of ‘Statio Bene Fida Carinis’ announces, still offers a safe home to seafaring travellers, tourists and intercontinental shipping.

Crawford Art Gallery says it is delighted to mark the anniversary of this important work and invites visitors to stroll by the gallery on Thursday 11 January for this echo of a once ubiquitous but now lost coastal sound.

About the Artist: Danny McCarthy (b.1950) is one of Ireland’s pioneers of performance art and sound art for over 40 years and he continues to be a leading exponent exhibiting and performing both in Ireland and abroad. In 2006, he founded The Quiet Club with Mick O’Shea, a floating membership sound (art and electronics) performance group. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, and is a founding director of Triskel Arts Centre and National Sculpture Factory.

Published in Lighthouses

Coastal Notes Coastal Notes covers a broad spectrum of stories, events and developments in which some can be quirky and local in nature, while other stories are of national importance and are on-going, but whatever they are about, they need to be told.

Stories can be diverse and they can be influential, albeit some are more subtle than others in nature, while other events can be immediately felt. No more so felt, is firstly to those living along the coastal rim and rural isolated communities. Here the impact poses is increased to those directly linked with the sea, where daily lives are made from earning an income ashore and within coastal waters.

The topics in Coastal Notes can also be about the rare finding of sea-life creatures, a historic shipwreck lost to the passage of time and which has yet many a secret to tell. A trawler's net caught hauling more than fish but cannon balls dating to the Napoleonic era.

Also focusing the attention of Coastal Notes, are the maritime museums which are of national importance to maintaining access and knowledge of historical exhibits for future generations.

Equally to keep an eye on the present day, with activities of existing and planned projects in the pipeline from the wind and wave renewables sector and those of the energy exploration industry.

In addition Coastal Notes has many more angles to cover, be it the weekend boat leisure user taking a sedate cruise off a long straight beach on the coast beach and making a friend with a feathered companion along the way.

In complete contrast is to those who harvest the sea, using small boats based in harbours where infrastructure and safety poses an issue, before they set off to ply their trade at the foot of our highest sea cliffs along the rugged wild western seaboard.

It's all there, as Coastal Notes tells the stories that are arguably as varied to the environment from which they came from and indeed which shape people's interaction with the surrounding environment that is the natural world and our relationship with the sea.