Tides and Peripheries

The soundscape laps and crashes; caws, whips and shrills. It’s a world’s edge.

And it’s this idea of the edge—of boundary and margin—coupled with the ebb and flow of tidal brine where ‘Europe ends and the Atlantic begins’ that informs Breda’s current multimedia exhibition 

A key element is a short video shot by Frank O’Reilly, a frenetically paced time-lapse video, created using 1,400 stills, gives way to a slower, black-and-white film section towards the end. It was shot without break over six hours at ‘the mud flats’ of low tide out behind Breda’s edge-of-the-world house. Breda is depicted standing in the bay, painting on three canvases. The tide comes in, the boundaries between earth and sea alter, and slowly the artist becomes submerged, while the artworks rise with the water and remain afloat. 

The other elements of the exhibition chime in with this exploration of boundary, each bringing their own moment of peripherality. one’s a path, one’s a boundary field, one’s the edge of the ocean—they’re all edges. It’s about us being on edge as people and the constantly changing borders of the world, internal and external.” 

That landscape is at once intimately familiar and vastly unknowable, but it is also the gateway to another world, a massive expanse of ocean separating the landmasses of two continents. And the energy created by the sway and interplay of all of those borders has proved very fertile ground.                 Excerpt from interview with Ciara Moynihan