Clare Langan at Castletownbere gallery: 'There’s a great stillness involved in taking photographs'
Clare Langan - work on display in Castletownbere
Only an artist as inventive as Clare Langan would find commonality behind the ancient beehive huts on Skellig Michael and the contemporary Bur Khalifa building in Dubai. Both feature in her 15-minute experimental film, The Floating World.
Langan used infrared film when shooting on Skellig Michael, which gives the impression that snow is falling on the monastic settlement. In Dubai, she filmed the 830-metre-high Bur Khalifa building and other skyscrapers shrouded in mist. Both contribute to the dream-like quality of The Floating World, which, like much of Langan’s work, is an enchanting synthesis of sound and vision.
Langan, an NCAD graduate who went on to study film on a Fulbright scholarship at New York University, may be best known for her award-winning film and video installations, but she also maintains a practice as a photographer. A selection of her images, including black-and-white stills from The Floating World, is currently being shown under the collective title Elizium at the Sarah Walker Gallery in Castletownbere, in West Cork.
As Langan explains, photography was her first love. “I started off taking photographs as a student, and the films came out of that,” she says. “The Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky was a big influence. For a long time, after studying in New York, I got very caught up in the process of making and exhibiting my films. The idea of showing my photographs again came about through my discussions with Eamon Maxwell, who was curating At the Gates of Silent Memory, an exhibition I did at the Luan Gallery in Athlone in February this year.”
To Langan’s mind, the experience of taking photographs is very different from filmmaking. “It comes from a different place in my head,” she says. “There’s a great stillness involved in taking photographs, just as there is in experiencing them in the gallery.”
Langan is known for her fascination with extreme landscapes, an interest she attributes to the contrast between her surroundings in her native Dublin and her experience of the West of Ireland, where her family always took their holidays. “I loved the wide open spaces and the big skies in the west. And to this day, I love peripheral places, where the natural world is beyond human control.”
Much of her work has been filmed in the Namib Desert and in Iceland, where the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson collaborated on a number of her projects. “Iceland really drew me in, from the first time I visited,” she says. “It’s an ancient landscape, and yet it’s always being remade. Volcanoes erupt, and the ice flows create new canyons all the time.”
From around 2010, Langan became more interested in placing people within the landscapes in her work. A few years later she began working with the Swedish choreographer, Maria Nilsson Waller, on films such as The Winter of 13 Storms. “I’d always wanted to work with a choreographer,” she says. “I did my thesis on choreography while studying fine art, and my interest in that has been in the background all the time. The Winter of 13 Storms was filmed around Dingle, where I’ve lived for the past fifteen years or so. It’s a three-screen film that chronicles the disconnect between two people. A number of photographs in the exhibition, such as Storm (Gravity) and Leafstorm, come from that project.”
Langan admits that being based in Dingle - rather than in a big art centre such as London or New York – has been challenging at times. “I’ve certainly struggled with it,” she says. “But I had shown around the world before I moved here, and I’ve managed to go on working with people internationally and showing internationally all these years.”
The Elizium exhibition is just one of her recent accomplishments. “The Crawford Art Gallery in Cork bought two of my pieces in June, and one of my films, The Heart of a Tree, has just been bought by an organisation called Fondazione In Between Art Film in Rome."
That work is also showing with two other films – And In the Silence Came, and Flight from the City - in an exhibition called The New Dawn Fades at the Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast this month.
After Langan completes her new film, she hopes to take a break. “It feels like I’ve been on a merry-go-round, making work non-stop, for the past fifteen or twenty years. It’s such a chaotic time in the world, and I’ve become more and more conscious of the planet’s fragility. I’d like to feel that whatever body of work I make next will have relevance, and have something to say about all that.”
- Clare Langan: Elizium is curated by Nuala Fenton and Sarah Walker, and runs at the Sarah Walker Gallery in Castletownbere, Co Cork until August 20.
- clarelangan.com
- sarahwalkergallery.com
