Fiona Brehony Explores Gloucester Harbor, Whale Song, and the Living Memory of Water

About this event

GOETEMANN ARTIST RESIDENCY BRINGS MANCHESTER-BASED ARTIST AND WRITER TO GLOUCESTER OPENING TALK: THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 10 / (RNAC 5-6 PM) OPEN STUDIO: THURSDAY 2-4 PM 9/17 (OCEAN ALLIANCE) WALK/LISTEN: THURSDAY 9/24 2-4 PM (OCEAN ALLIANCE) CLOSING TALK: THURSDAY 10/1 4-5 PM (OCEAN ALLIANCE) Gloucester, MA – What can water remember? What stories are held within a harbor, a river, or an ocean and whose stories are we able to hear? These questions are at the heart of the work of artist and writer Fiona Brehony, the current Goetemann Artist-in-Residence at Rocky Neck Art Colony. Based in Manchester, Britain, Brehony works across moving image, sound, and performance, collaborating with scientists, composers, historians, and communities to create poetic and inquisitive works that explore the relationships between people, places, and waterways. During her residency in Gloucester, Brehony is turning her attention to Gloucester Harbor, exploring the harbor as both a natural ecosystem and a human-made infrastructure. Her work is informed by historian Richard White’s concept of the “organic machine” – a landscape that is simultaneously natural and shaped by human activity. This idea offers a way of approaching the harbor not as a backdrop, but as a complex living system in which water, industry, infrastructure, human communities, and other species are continually shaping one another. Brehony’s approach of thinking with water considers water not simply as a subject or environment, but as a material that connects bodies, places, histories, and species. Drawing on Astrida Neimanis’s concept of Bodies of Water, she is interested in the ways human bodies are already materially entangled with the waters around them. In Gloucester, this raises questions about how we might listen to a harbor as bodies already implicated in its waters – and how whale song, human voices, harbor infrastructure, and the movement of water might become part of a shared, though uneven, ecological and…

Description from northofboston.org