For ‘**All mountains are moving’** Murnaghan has been working with a collection of small Irish beach pebbles, split and polished by his Great Grandfather early in the last century, a sort of post Darwinian pursuit. This once lost collection has been reassembled and central sections of the stones have been scanned at very high definition. The revelation of their interior imagery acts as a cipher, communicating meaning and manifesting content throughout the gallery spaces. An obsessive, animist position is taken; revealing a tension between what is ‘known’ and what may be believed.

To being the exhibition process, Murnaghan placed an ad in local media asking for the ashes of a loved one to be donated so that he could make a work from them.

  
Limerick City Gallery of Art. September 13th - November 13th 2016

All Mountains are Moving.

Something is rising from the depths, slowly turning, attempting contact. It senses us, our movement and memory. Its ancient song hums beneath the forest. A song we have long forgotten.

This new work from artist/director Paul Murnaghan was conceived when sitting alone on the ocean floor, feeling observed and growing aware of some other presence. At first it took the form of a musical composition but that quickly evolved into movement and video, visually merging human and non-human landscapes, retracing an ancient departure, from deep seabed to forested hills. It takes a less Human-centric view of existence, it is without words, it leaves space for the viewer while planting catalysts in the subconscious. Our attention is focused on and through a sole protagonist, Irish artist and World champion freediver, Nina McGowan\*, supported on this Animist journey by choreographer Cindy Cummins, with a singular soundtrack composed by Murnaghan.

  
‘Against the Waning Light’ is funded by the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaion, Visual Arts Prtoject Award.
  
  
Paul Murnaghan is an artist that works with the substance of belief, exploring points of intersection between things spiritual, scientific and psychological. He has been exhibiting video and soundworks internationally for over twenty years and has received numerous awards as an artist. www.paulmurnaghan.com

**Director Statement**

  
'Against the Waning Light' is the first project that I intend to expand outside of the art gallery system, where most of my work is normally viewed. It has been two years in the making and was shot beneath The Red Sea and high in The Dublin Mountains. I have attempted to shoot this work through a less human-centric lens. It's surface themes are Ecological, Animist, Feminist, it posits the earth as a sentient being, with an open ended narrative that allows the viewer space to evolve ideas that surface for themsleves.

It was fully funded by The Arts Council of Ireland.
  
  

Against the Waning Light

While on the Bolay Residency at Linenhall, an arts centre in an Irish town with a large refugee population, I published a question in local media, ‘Where do you go?’ The answers could take any form, memory, place, food, song, ritual, lies. The walk from my cottage to studio was twentythree minutes, I filmed it every day for eight weeks. 

Replies to my question came as video (in studio), audio, email and anonymous words. For those not fond of cameras, avatars took their place. These avatars allowed the process to evolve and I began to see them as digital migrants, their culture so different from ours, the fear that they're taking our jobs or that they are dangerous. Their presence heightened the question of where we might find comfort in truthless times and led me to infusing two separate photographic histories of Castlebar.

  
video extract https://vimeo.com/1019880654?fl=pl&fe=sh 

  
First exhibited Linenhall Arts Centre, July 19th - August 31st 2024\. 

Split the Curlew and You'll Find the Music.

**Bathing in the light** extracts thirty seconds from history. It begins with the iconic image of Donald Campbell attempting to break the water speed record at Lake Coniston, England in 1967\. He dies trying. His last moments of existence were captured on film and committed to a grainy cultural memory. Here, these images are processed as a slow erratic flow and the sounds are filtered through a Vocoder. A Vocoder is a contemporary digital device commonly used within the world of Pop music to allow those with poor singing voices to sound in tune. What emulates as the strains of a musical instrument, is in fact digital technology attempting to harmonize Cambell’s last words and the sound of the rocket powered engine that delivered him to his end.

  
Original footage licenced from Pathe News. 

This work plays as a continious loop. 5:20

First exhibited at 'Melancholy in Progress' - Taiwan International Video Art Biennial 2012.

Bathing in the light

For the past sixteen years, Paul Murnaghan has used the garden at the rear of his home/studio as a form of ontological notebook. Ideas that developed in parallel to experiment and exhibition are reconsidered and articulated through the lens and through a more personal framework. The work’s content includes both recordings of opportune moments and structured scenarios, which reflect a glimpsed understanding of things peripheral to knowing, in an attempt to reveal the visible and the invisible through a multitude of methods. Murnaghan will continue to shoot/edit/remake this work until he dies, and this film about existance will end when he ends. In this short extract a worm from the garden tries to make contact using choreography as an alphabet.

https://vimeo.com/133295501?fl=pl&fe=sh

First exhibited at Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin. Charles Gallagher Gallery

September 05, 2014 - October 26, 2014.

Penumbra (2014)

In August and early September of 2008 Paul Murnaghan travelled through Finland, Estonia, Sweden and Slovenia on a distinctively Utopian endeavour, to compose a universal hymn. The starting point for this project was a Coke advertisement from the 1970’s in which The New Seekers were employed to deliver the lyric: _‘I’d like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony’_. As a methodology utilising a musical structure and moral ideology, it was a very effective advertising vehicle. Murnaghan set up meetings using arts groups, databases, newspapers, media and word of mouth. Eventually interested parties would answer the question: ’if you had the opportunity to compose the opening line of a universal hymn, what would it be and how would you sing it’?

The composition of the Hymn as exhibited at Platform (Finland), mixes visuals and sounds from over one hundred pieces of video footage taken from meetings organised by participants. The places and contexts encountered are diverse and surprising, as the work is constructed by a wide range of individuals from various cultural backgrounds and situations.

https://vimeo.com/231607755?fl=pl&fe=sh 

The video extract (above link) is from the diptych 'Map of the Empire' which was made from the footage of this journey. With this work he reuses video footage from ‘Neocredo’ adding random material from the same period, imposing opinion where once was objectivity. Liberties are taken and extracts from conversations in transit, in bars and outside of the project context are dropped into the mix. Partially obscured sentences claiming answers to ubiquitous questions appear throughout the piece and voice/sound is transposed between visuals. Because of these juxtapositions, much of the content is not what it seems and this multiplies the space for misinterpretation, deliberating supporting a casual disregard for stated beliefs and the formation of spurious opinion.

  
First exhibited at **Blasphemy** \- Oonagh Young Gallery, Dublin, Jan/Feb 2010

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