“Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.”
- John Muir
Endless Song is an audio/video work drawn from three years of on-site field recordings, sonic mediations and conversations on listening in the Inagh Valley of Western Ireland.
Commissioned by Interface, an artist residency center in western Ireland, and funded by the Arts Council of Ireland, for an initiative called the Woodland Symposium. The Woodland Symposium brought six artist of different mediums to Interface over multiple years to make work in response to the changing ecology of the site as they embark on a years long reforestation project to revive the native woodlands, essentially undoing decades of human interference with the regenerative carbon capture potential of the region’s bogs.
Over three years Sroka returned to the site for two weeks annually to gather audio and video field recordings, to learn from a local ecologist and an archaeologist, and to engage with the community in participatory listening sessions. Each of these elements informed one another. Video documentation of both the minute and the magnificent scale of the landscape was informed by the details of the sonic environment, and a broadening understanding of them both through active listening. "During the first residency I sought varied locations to observe the environment using techniques and philosophies of listening as a creative practice. In the next year I put out a call for participatory one-to-one listening sessions. The intent of these outings was to listen as fully and openly as possible, to focus on nuances of sound which are often overlooked without active attention, and to grasp the entire soundscape as an interrelated palette. For me it was a way to expand my own perspective through the perception of others. In our subsequent conversations (with 14 people over more than 30 hours), many of the participants, being creatives themselves, described their listening experience in visual and poetic language. These were edited into lyrical, narrative collages, tracing the participants overlapping impressions of the sonic environment and their collective perceptual experience. This continued to illuminate my process as I returned home each year to experiment with the material I had gathered. To channel our conversations, on listening removed from everyday preconceptions, into a visual language that would also challenge its ordinary context, I learned new cinematographic and video processing techniques, alternating video with segments in total darkness focusing only on sound."
The first three years of the Woodland Symposium culminated in two group exhibitions in Ireland at the Galway Art Centre in Galway City in 2023-24 and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in 2023, with artists Christine Mackey, Linda Schirmer, Helena Doyle, Noelle Gallagher and Sarah Roseingrave.
