SITE
A DROWNING MELTED PERSISTENT MEMORY
video essay
14:37 min
2023
In the quiet courtyard of the Heritage Museum surrounded by olive trees and wooden flooring A DROWNING MELTED PERSISTENT MEMORY is visible as a large-scale projection. The muted acoustics of the courtyard intensify the calm, almost reverent atmosphere of the work.
Skehan’s work presents changing visual worlds: close-ups of mosses and microscopic structures intertwine with landscape shots of green deciduous forests and natural scenes. Abandoned buildings slowly reclaimed by plants also appear, as well as glaciers, ice crystals, and water surfaces. This is repeatedly interrupted by the laying of tarot cards.
These images are accompanied by a layered sound composition: soft whispering and pulsating sounds blend with splashing water, birdsong and melodic sequences. Abrupt sound disturbances create an additional fragile electronic sound layer. Simultaneously, fragmented words appear on the video, giving the visual sequence a narrative structure. The interplay of sound and image creates a subdued but intense atmosphere. The combination of thriving natural imagery, melting ice crystals, and decayed remnants of human architecture produces a tension between human influence and nature’s reclamation, between decay and continuity.
Inspired by the evolutionary history of an ancient moss that transitioned from water to land millions of years ago, Skehan’s work explores nature as its own repository of knowledge and history beyond human archives. This moss not only significantly shaped the development of life on Earth but still contributes enormously to oxygen production today. Nevertheless, it is often viewed by humans as a threat to buildings and architecture and is therefore displaced from its habitats. In her video glaciers and sediments appear as archives outside human historical perception, where traces of past, present and future merge.
BACKGROUND
Laura Skehan is an Irish artist with a strong commitment to context, research, and community engagement throughout her practice. She combines moving image, sound, and installation. Each project is rooted in extensive research, often involving collaboration with communities, ecologists, and interdisciplinary experts. Her focus lies on the intersection of art, memory, and the environment inviting reflection on memory, identity, and ecological transformation.
Her work often intertwines myth, time, and materiality to explore how agriculture, colonialism, architecture, climate, and the pursuit of knowledge have shaped the relationship between humans, non-humans, nature, technology, and science. She invites viewers into layered temporalities of life on Earth, delving into elements, minerals, flora, fauna, and the preservation of information in permafrost and glaciers.
EXHIBITIONS
2024 Berlin (de), CENTER FOR ART AND URBANISTICS: Interzone
2023 Reykjavik (is), ANNABELLES’S HOME: Home as Land, Home as Island: Traversing Cultures
2023 Barcelona (es), LOOP Festival: City Screens
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STUDIES
2016 Dublin (ie), UNIVERSITY, School of Creative Arts: BA Fine Arts
BIO
Lives in Dublin (ie), and Berlin (de).
LINKS
FEATURED IMAGE
Laura Skehan: A DROWNING MELTED PERSISTANT MEMORY. SEE DJERBA 2025 Houmt Souk. Photo: Wassim Ben Aissa.