APHASIA

APHASIA is the new work by collaborating artists Darragh O Callaghan and David Sudmalis. It is an immersive installation bringing together our practices in photomedia, sculpture, sound and music. Our blog on the work is at www.aphasiaocallaghansudmalis.blogspot.com

The term ‘aphasia’ comes from the Greek root meaning speechless caused by fear or perplexity.  In English, aphasia refers to a medical condition that presents as difficulties in language ability, occasioned by injury or disease to the brain. For us, we are treating the notion of aphasia as indicative of the difficulties of communication: contested meaning, incomplete comprehension, and malleable memory.  It is a rich personal reservoir of experience upon which we are both drawing for this work.

APHASIA takes its point of departure letters written to Darragh and her own dreams.  In bringing these source materials together, we bring into dispute worlds of reality and fantasy, disputed truths and obvious fictions, until these separate worlds merge and are indistinguishable from each other – a new entity with its own antecedents and consequents, and the inherent difficulties that such a conflation inevitably produces.

APHASIA is an immersive, convergent installation that has within it discrete elements that combine to create an atmosphere of missed communication, contested meaning, changing context and imprecise memory.

The elements within are:

• Entry installation - a red door through which one must pass through to enter APHASIA, with a sound installation comprised of a reworking of the Irish song of greeting Céad míle fáilte (you can hear an excerpt of this in one of the audio examples below)
• Tape and fog sculptural installation - masses of audio reel-to-reel tape suspended from the ceiling and fog hugging the floor creating a sense of disembodiment and disconnection from the immediate physical surroundings. In moving within and through the tape installation, the spectator negotiates a sensory dissociation with the field of vision restricted, with tape gently falling across the face, and with sound emanating from above. The fog that sits at floor level further reinforces this disembodiment, rendering the physical 'grounding' unseeable
• Quadraphonic sound installation - a quiet, understated sound composition based around the texts of letters to Darragh and her own dreams spatialised within the gallery
• Infrasonic installation - an inaudible sonic installation that has an involuntary impact on the physiology of the spectator
• Video projection installation - a return to the red door presented in an unfamiliar and unknowing context.

Read and experienced together, these elements combine to create a new world that is at first experienced linearly, then simultaneously. It draws upon sight, sound, touch - and it explores the minutiae of personal (mis)understanding amplified to a universal experience.

We hope you will join us in the journey of APHASIA, as our partner in seeing the project come to fruition. Have a look at the rewards that are on offer - we think that there is something there for just about everyone! Plus, of course, our enduring thanks and love...

All rewards will be posted to backers in early December 2012!!!
 

Thank you so very much,
Darragh and David