PORTABLE STONES

The work of Orla Barry is like a wall of words, constructed from images – or a wall of images, made up from words. One cannot exist without the other. Raised and bred in Ireland, she explores the semantics and the iconography of her mother tongue. Similarly to her former video work ’Portable Stones’ also sets up a fragmentary frame of reference around her texts, which share an unmistakable stream-of-consciousness approach. It’s as if the video is built around a piece of poetry, line by line, verse after verse; without any linear structure, but woven like a web of associative and intimate scraps of memories and voices. A girl escapes from the city; she wanders through an abandoned graveyard. Overwhelmed by silence she drifts off in some type of linguistic dream world. All kinds of voices, memory conductors, come over to her from across the sea, dragging her along with them through time. They discuss ‘not-speaking’, the loss of the body and communication problems in all its forms. The girl starts with a new life of waiting, longing and listening. Memory, fantasy and imagination are interwoven. With constant voice-over and monologues Barry achieves a humanisation of the open sea. The sea speaks and cries, embraces, seduces, gathers all the voices.