Sounding the Depths (1992)
Sounding the Depths (1992) installation at IMMA as part of The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now, 2021 - 2022
Sounding the Depths (1992)
Sounding the Depths (1992)
Sounding the Depths (1992)
Sounding the Depths (1992) video piece
A collaborative video, sound and photographic installation with Pauline Cummins.
Sounding the Depths symbolically opens up the body allowing it to speak and even laugh in defiance of patriarchal and heteronormative definitions of ‘woman’.
The artwork addresses the silencing of women and the Irish State's control over our sexuality, fertility, and bodily autonomy.
In a deeply repressive social and political climate, Cummins and Walsh utilise their bodies as active agents, subverting oppressive religious and legislative controls. These embodied works reject consumption and confront ´the male gaze´, overcoming the protective tendency to retract and tighten, the artists respond to the oppressive atmosphere and to the lack of freedom of sexual expression.
Originally devised for the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (1992), exhibited in the Tate Gallery, Liverpool, Kunstlerhaus, Graz, Austria and Street Level Photographic Gallery, Glasgow, all in 1993.
Sounding the Depths phase 11 was collected by IMMA in 1995 and exhibited in the exhibition The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now from November 2021 to November 2022.