Hymn of The Dawn | Katie O’Neill
30th Aug – 8th Sept | A4 Sounds Gallery

Hymn of The Dawn

Hymn of the Dawn responds to the overwhelming stimulants we face day to day in the city, particularly the area of Dorset Street which is being gentrified to facilitate student housing and fast food chains and has seen a rise in rental prices over the last years. The work is largely focused on the activity of walking, listening, and looking as an act of rebellion – intervening in the expected flow of capitalism by becoming a participant in what Derek Jarman called ‘Modern Nature’. She will explore the advantages and limits of this kind of walkway through photography, field recording, and film. She will unearth the social structures that ebb and flow around the waterway and lose herself in the simple activity of being amongst the wild flowers of the canal. Sounds, colour and images still and moving will come together in a room in A4 sounds where locals are invited to sit, mediate, and reflect on their changing urban landscape. By re-purposing the noise, scents and spirit of the canal inside the four walls of a modern city building, she questions our connection to the outdoors, urges viewers to reconnect with a more organic element of their home, and investigates the changing meaning of canals and rivers in urban settings.

This project is also supported under the Fingal Arts Office Artists’ Support Scheme 2018.

katie on neill 3 images

Katie O’Neill

Katie O’Neill is a multidisciplinary artist from Dublin. In 2012 she graduated from The Dublin Institute of Technology with a BA in Photography.

Katie aims to make work that questions the impact of immediate environment in the shaping of our mentality – for the work to act as a mode of disruption, providing relief from the physical and emotional restrictions that can isolate and alienate an individual. Katie has a strong dedication to self-publishing personal and political works in various
media. An example of this work is ‘Loudmouth’, a collaborative feminist zine which called for submissions from women detailing their experiences of sexism. Notably, she was the main photographer on the first round of portraits of the X-ile Project. The X-ile project is an ongoing online gallery of women who have accessed abortion services outside of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

During her recent residency in Draíocht in Blanchardstown, O’Neill explored her growing interest in sound art. Katie acted as a collector and curator of an archive of found “footage” in the form of field recordings, video and photographs taken in Ireland, Budapest, Germany and America. She created video-audio collages using an analogue Tascam four track recorder and digital music software Ableton along with a Phillips Mini DV camera.

In January 2017, O’Neill embarked on a trip to Latvia where she worked in collaboration with audio-visual performance duo Richard Thompson and Sabine Moore (Culture As A Dare) on performance pieces in venues such as MIM, (a contemporary artist collective in Tallinn, Estonia.) O’Neill is currently working in collaboration with Fallow Media on the topic of borders, displacement, cultural currency and obsolescence. She is working on a collaboration with Baltic Analog Lab with previous collaborators Richard Thompson and Sabine Moore, with the support of Ieva Balode to learn new analouge film development techniques and to foster relationships with others working in this medium and field.