buff-tailed bumblebee
Recorded in Mullaghreelan Woods, Co. Kildare.
red velvet spider mite
Recorded in Mullaghreelan Woods, Co. Kildare.
common garden snail
Recorded in Mullaghreelan Woods, Co. Kildare.
wood boring beetle grub
Recorded at Oakview Cottage, Co. Kildare.
earthworm
Recorded in Mullaghreelan Woods, Co. Kildare.
We live in a very rural location in Kildare across from a beautiful woodland, Mullaghreelan Woods. I had a baby boy in 2018 and we have a practice of taking daily walks in the woods. In the beginning when he was tucked into a sling, the walks soothed him to sleep and allowed me an hour to think and to connect to a world beyond our home. I often found myself grappling with a tenuous and morphing identity as a mother and an artist, struggling to reconcile the overlapping boundaries of the domestic space and the studio space. During these walks I began to take short video recordings, 10-30 seconds, of insects and invertebrate animals in the woods as a way to extend my relationship with the natural world. At the same, I started to record the strange sounds my newborn son was making – beyond the coos, there were odd gurgles and grunts, raspy pants and high pitched peeps. I overlaid his sounds onto the videos – reimagining the otherworldly sounds of these beings, conflating the domestic and the wild.