Final Installation for the Level 9 Professional Diploma in Art and Ecology at NCAD.
Bike Lab is a travelling, performative, and playful scientific darkroom lab on my bike, complete with all the equipment I use to create my work at Bullock Harbour. It also includes my own version of a lab book, which documents my time there, recording daily experiments, conversations, observations, and reflections.
This installation draws on the conceptual framework that underpins my wider practice, while also incorporating ideologies surrounding more caring and conscious forms of movement and peripatetic exploration. The cycling element connects the inner city of industrial Dublin with the aquatic ecosystem of Bullock Harbour through embodied acts of travel. The work also draws from ideas surrounding eco-phenomenology, and radical pedagogy, in my approach to creating in the harbour and viewing it as a site of learning and exchange, through the everyday life of seaweeds, fishermen, tides, weather, and the often invisible coexistence of human and non-human species.
The work is also informed by the Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the idea that the first evolutionary technology was not the weapon but the carrier bag, a tool for gathering and bringing objects home, symbolising a feminist alternative to dominant, aggressive, masculine narratives. Bike Lab questions how the ways we move through and create in the world might become more intentional, caring, and responsive to the places and communities, both human and non human, we inhabit and engage with.
