Sound Out
Cork City outdoor sites Ireland
01 Sept - 30 Sept 2005

Artist Danny McCarthy and musician, composer, writer, musicologist and sound curator David Toop, have co-curated a major exhibition of outdoor sound art, with the National Sculpture Factory acting as facilitating partner.

A series of speakers were installed within Wandesford Quay, in the centre of the city. Voices were heard playing from the speakers, reading through the street and place names of the city in the form of an abstract text, in both English and Gaelic texts. With the names floating out into the ether, reflecting off the buildings around, the ground, the work explored the collision between physical space and the human mind.

Some place names had an immediate understanding, French Street and the Huguenot Quarter clearly from a historical perspective, Prosperity Square and Industry Place from a developing city, and others demonstrated a more poetic use of language, Anglesea, Crane Lane, Summerhill. Embracing both the cultural and the historical, the city and the wilderness, this work appraised the geographies people inhabit, visit, defend, destroy - and overlook.

Other artists included Christina Kubisch (Berlin), Max Eastley (London) and Akio Suzuki (Japan).

All these works were accessible to everyone to discover, respond to, share, and think about, in an everyday situation as they walked about the city.