Áine O’Dwyer
(London)
Áine O’Dwyer is an artist whose work is informed by both the conceptual concerns of sound-art and traditional compositional techniques, embracing the broader aesthetics of sound and its relationship to environment, time, audience and structure. O’Dwyer’s work has been informed by her study of the individual idiosycracies found in each pipe organ and notably the realisation that each individual organ is meticulously tuned to the measurements of the building in which it is housed, allowing it to connect intimately with its surrounding architecture.
Poems for Daedalus (2018), was a series of site-specific performances that O’Dwyer developed in Athens, based on the exploration of a building, its intimacies and the surrounding neighbourhood. Her book Poems for play pays homage to the specificity of time and place, with a titular nod to the duality of meaning: ‘to enjoy oneself by interacting with one’s surroundings’, vs ‘the realisation of creative form through the choreography of social poetics, and the mechanics of body/building as instrument.” Similarly, the notion of the “holding space as extension-of-instrument” can be seen in her work such as Accompaniment for Captives (Open Ear Festival, 2019). This piece was written for Horseshoe bay, Sherkin Island, Ireland. It centred around two local fishing boats, creating an “environmental tapestry where land, sea, man and animal were woven into one symphonic whole.”
