Dublin artist Paul Murnaghan premieres his debut short film Against the Waning Light, a spiritual dive into the natural world.
After many years of reclusively creating music and art that he never tried to exhibit, the Irish multidisciplinary artist Paul Murnaghan emerged from his bedroom in the early nineties and began writing music with several different bands inspired by the likes of Joy Division, Magazine and Bauhaus.
Throughout the nineties, he began experimenting with different media for his expression. “What I often do to start a project is I’ll put an advertisement in a newspaper or online,” Paul tells Totally Dublin of his process. “When I get feedback, it will inform me on what I’m going to do.
“So, there was one idea in the Limerick City Gallery [of Art]. To begin the exhibition, I put an ad in a paper, asking if I could have the ashes of a loved one to make an artwork out of. So, the question begins the process, and also begins the artwork.
“So, when I had the ashes, then I had to decide, ‘What do I do with ashes? Do you form them into a shape or something? How would that work?’ And I decided, actually, to just spread them out onto a big brass plate on a pedestal, and I took a scientific film of hydra, which scientists say is an immortal microorganism that lives in water – it’s all around us – and it can divide cells and repair itself, and, seemingly, doesn’t die. So, I projected an immortal being onto the ashes of a dead being, so it was almost like God laying on top of humanity, in a way.”
As can probably be discerned by that response, Paul has always been fascinated with the cross-section between the scientific and the spiritual, and getting people beyond what he finds to be the insular “ego-centric” nature of humans that seeks to detach itself from the environment, which has dictated his work for the past thirty years.
For the past two of those years, Paul has been working on the 26-minute-long non-narrative filmic experience Against the Waning Light, about life around us, that connects the deep ocean to our everyday scenery. “I had taken a trip,” Paul says of how the idea was born.
“I decided to learn how to scuba dive, and I was sitting at the bottom of the Red Sea, and I felt as if I was being observed, and I mentioned it to some of the other divers when I came up, and they said, ‘Oh, that’s an awareness of presence. You feel the presence,’ and I was like, ‘God, that’s an amazing idea!’
“I was still blown away by the fact that you could sit underwater! I had never scuba’d before! It was so beautiful there – the colours, and the forms of the fish, and all that sort of stuff – that I decided to write a piece of music about it. Then it evolved into the idea of making a film.
“I thought of Nina McGowan, who’s a friend of mine and is also an artist and musician, and she’s a world-champion freediver, as well. So, I thought she’d be the perfect person for it, so I constructed a journey from the deep abyss of the ocean, up through the deserts, and into the Irish mountains, which is where it ends.
“But it’s connecting the sentience of the deep ocean to the intelligence of the forest. The things that are under our feet. The things that are under the sea that we know nothing about. We hardly explore it, you know? We’re always thinking about space; we rarely seem to think about this world that we don’t know much about underneath our feet.”
Against the Waning Light was funded by the Arts Council who have channelled funds to Paul’s work over the years allowing numerous projects of different forms to materialise., a rare experience for Paul, who typically relies on self-funding for his works, but which helped the project materialise. “When I first made art, I never even thought about applying for money for it, you know?” Paul says. “When you form bands, you don’t think about applying for money to run a band; you just figure out ways of doing it. You’re still making art, you know?
“I mean, with this one, I gotta say, this is fully-funded by the Irish Arts Council. It’s a Visual Arts Project Award that gave me the money to be able to develop and fund it, and make it, so I’m very thankful for that. It’s been a long time before I could get this sort of funding, and I’ve been working for about thirty years doing this sort of thing, and it’s very hit-or-miss.”
Paul believes that collaboration is a critical aspect of his art, and for Against the Waning Light, beyond Nina, he also enlisted the talents of choreographer Cindy Cummins and the underwater cinematographer Federico Buzzoni, who worked on the Netflix documentary The Deepest Breath and was a friend of Nina’s after filming some material for her. “Without those people, there’s no way I would be able to make this work,” Paul asserts.
Paul edited and scored the film himself, with post-production wrapping in June. Against the Waning Light will finally premiere at ‘Atlantaquaria’ a large aquarium in Salthill, Galway as part of the “A Night To Sea” event for Culture Night. It will then be shown as part of a dance festival at the West Cork Arts Centre in Uillin, Co. Cork, afterwards, before coming to The Pale.
“It will be shown in Dublin before the end of the year,” Paul declares. “I’m talking to two venues at the moment. I kind of want to have an outdoor, large-scale [event] if we can. That’s the plan.
“I want to move outside of the gallery space, and not just always be talking to a similar audience. I think that if I can spread it out to different areas, and have it pop up in different places…It sounds capitalistic, but it’s not. This will always be shown for free, basically. So, everything that I’ve mentioned that we’ll be doing will be open to any audience for free.”
For screening info visit paulmurnaghan.com
Words: Aaron Kavanagh
