Page 42 - Landmarls and Lifeforms Ann

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As a scientist I believe most of us have an inherent interest in wildlife in general, probably because we were all hunters and gatherers once and we needed to have an interest in our natural surroundings, and birds in particular because of their aesthetic appeal. Frieda mentioned they have a link with dinosaurs; they are in fact direct descendants of dinosaurs, which is remarkable. They are interesting behaviour wise, such as the bowerbird
of Papua New Guinea, which creates elaborate structures to attract a mate, much in the way an artist creates art with a view to attracting interest from the public. I think there’s a really nice parallel there.
In recent years I have begun to see how strong the similarities are between what we as scientists do and what artists do: we explore and tease out details, develop ideas and eventually become obsessive in a creative kind of way, which is just what happened to Frieda when she got lost in our little museum at BEES and became fixated on one particular group of exhibits, the skulls of toucans and hornbills.
The very title of this exhibition Landmarks and Lifeforms is pretty much the definition of what ecology is, the interaction of animals (lifeforms) and their environment (landmarks); and for me, the parallel between an ecologist’s and an artist’s work in terms of innovation as a fundamental approach is really quite striking.
John Quinn
We go through the world, it seems to me, we humans, possessed by the need to take the language of a thing being itself and transform it into a language we can share. We single something out, we consider it, and then we re-insert it in the plenum - as Danny did, when he cast a Conquistador’s helmet in living lava.
Consider that tall collaborative piece with the beautifully printed skulls
of birds, and then that piece of brain coral: the coral was perfectly
happy being itself, it didn’t need a name, it doesn’t care, doesn’t know how to care, whether it resembles a human or animal brain - but we do, because Frieda saw the graphic possibilities, the associative, metaphoric possibility in that resemblance. We see it, because she did.
When we do this sort of thing, we are asserting that we belong in the world, by virtue of what we do for others. The artist, the writer, the musician, the scientist, cannot exist in a solipsistic state; there must be, for them, always a gesture of communication towards an “other”, known or unknown.
Somewhere along the line, humans became separated from the totality of what is. We are always trying to heal that wound, we’re always trying to talk ourselves back to the world - to remind and re-assure ourselves that science is nature, that the plane flying overhead is nature, that the painting is nature, everything is nature. That is the work Frieda and Danny are doing: healing the wound.
Theo Dorgan
Panel discussion (extracts) at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre