‘The Gate, or the disk of the sun will turn to the disk of the moon and our children sold for silver’, is a public call to action. The climate emergency, global political landscape and effects of late-stage capitalism proves we are living in a time of compounding crises. This collaborative and interdisciplinary project with Rhonda Mc Govern from the Trinity Centre for Environmental Humanities and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Clare Kelly from the Trinity Institute of Neurosciences, has arisen from a collective understanding that behavioural change in response to these issues can and must happen.
Set within the exhibition space, there will be an opportunity to converse with the panel and ask questions about their individual practices as well as the exhibition itself.
Biographies
Celina Muldoon is an artist based in the Northwest of Ireland. With live performance at the core of her practice she uses moving image, installation, sound and AI to develop large scale environments within which audiences engage with the socio-political structures and the body. Muldoon has exhibited nationally and internationally and has received multiple funding awards from the Arts Council of Ireland. She has participated in prestigious international residencies including the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris and the International Curatorial Programme in New York.
Muldoon plans to return to New York to develop an interdisciplinary project with experts in political science, climate change and economics based in the U.S. While there, she will develop a major exhibition to be presented in New York in 2025.
Rhonda McGovern is in the process of submitting her doctoral research based on the meteorological data in the Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylonia. These diaries are one of the longest continuous records of meteorological observations in the world, undertaken by generations of scribes operating with scientific precision, ranging from 652-61 BCE. Written in cuneiform script on clay tablets, many of these ‘windows into ancient Babylonia’ were discovered and transported to the British Museum in the 1870s and 1880s, with transliterations and translations leading to a published series in the past century.
This research was undertaken in the interdisciplinary setting of the Trinity Centre for Environmental Humanities (TCEH) in Trinity College Dublin, under an Irish Research Council Starting Laureate Award, as part of the wider Climates of Conflict in Ancient Babylonia project. Prior to that Rhonda completed a BA in Geography from Maynooth University followed by MSc in Climate Change through Irish Climate and Research Units (ICARUS) in Maynooth University.
Dr Clare Kelly received her BA in Psychology from Trinity College Dublin in 2002. Shortly after graduating, she joined the lab of Hugh Garavan, PhD, and began to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to non-invasively assess human brain structure and function. In 2006, Clare graduated from Trinity College with a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience.
Upon completion of her PhD, she joined the research group of Drs. F. Xavier Castellanos and Michael P. Milham at the New York University Child Study Center, first as a Postdoctoral Fellow, then as an Associate Research Scientist, and ultimately as an Assistant Professor.
In 2015, Clare returned to Trinity College to become an Ussher Assistant Professor of Functional Neuroimaging, working at Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience (TCIN), with a joint appointment in the School of Psychology and Department of Psychiatry at the School of Medicine. Her research vision is to trace the roots of mental health difficulties in the developing brain, so that we can identify at-risk individuals at the earliest possible point.
Image: Celina Muldoon, The Gate, 2024, performance, moving image, installation, sound, Charlie Jo Doherty, Emmet Toner and Sarah Mc Keever, Image courtesy of the artist.