Amphibious Sound

2010 /Lough Key Forest Park, 2012/ Project Arts Centre

In Ruth E Lyons’ Amphibious Sound, the artist has stitched together the peat-black neoprene of 70 wetsuits, rendering the bunch into a 10-metre blanket, a spongy pool of soft flooring that can lie comfortably atop water or land. The project was completed at the Lough Key Forest Park Experience, where ancient ruins and tourist canopies comingle and where the view of the lake struck Lyons as “both beautiful and oppressive.” In an indoor space, the black blanket recreates the natural dichotomy she observed, a light-swallowing in-between place which defies definitions verbal or visual and somehow reaches indefinitely downward, much deeper than the space it occupies, into the bricked-off bedrock oubliettes and the disregarded annexes of consciousness.

Large bodies of water have always been fertile devices for the wayward and doleful. Moreover, humankind has been as masochistically obsessed with making analysable the depths of the sea as it has with the far reaches of space, both times with only moderate success. Maritime references in English prose and verse are rife, one such salient attempt by the consummate literary mariner Joseph Conrad reads:

Beyond the line of the sea horizon the world for me did not exist as assuredly as it does not exist for the mystics who take refuge on the tops of high mountains.  I am speaking now of that innermost life…where a man indeed must live alone but need not give up all hope of holding converse with his kind.”[i]

Lyons too is interested in what she describes as “the mediated experience of history” at Lough Key, with the physical relationships between the lake’s dark fathoms and the peculiar sensibility of the wet suit material. Located somewhere between the unreachable depths and the tactility of the neoprene there seems to be a secret of time and consciousness.

And here another maritime citation, after a fashion, a mention to the press by US Attorney General Eric Holder in relationship to the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico:

The department has filed initial charges in its investigation into the Deepwater Horizon disaster against an individual for allegedly deleting records relating to the amount of oil flowing from the Macondo well after the explosion that led to the devastating tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico.[ii][..1]

The sea can hide things from people. It can hide people from the land. The “individual” in question, an engineer named Kurt Mix, was accused of deleting more than 200 SMS messages from his phone, conversations with a supervisor for British Petroleum. While the “top kill” tactic was being touted out to the media, Mix was advising that the flow rate of oil out of the spill was too high. BP ordered that top kill commence. Success was very unlikely, but perhaps the sea would hide enough.

Would that those who see truth and convenient falsehood as traversable could move so easily between innocence and culpability, or between past transgressions and present comeuppance. The water is attractive to both low-altitude mystics and crooked industries alike, maybe for almost the same reasons. The amphibious nature of Lyons’ creation is a device, comparable to the traits that have made frogs and crocodiles endlessly fascinating to cultures that share a nativity with them. But here that dual quality is overlaid onto formlessness: a drooping, draping thing that has no fast shape, and no way to assert its own form in space. It is a puddle of either-neither, permitting no final word, only the threat that what was sunken is not lost irrevocably, that it may be dredged up. 

And we live alone, but may still have converse. Amphibians we.

[i] Conrad, Joseph, “Author’s Note” in The Mirror of the Sea and A Personal Record., London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1968, p.vi.

[ii] Goldenberg, Suzanne, “Former BP Engineer charged with destroying evidence in Gulf oil spill”  The Guardian (Tuesday 24 April 2012) http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/24/bp-engineer-charged-gulf-spill

TEXT by CURT RIEGELNEGG commissioned by Project Arts Centre