“The River Liffey runs through the heart of Dublin as an enduring presence, shifting and layered. I don’t just represent the Liffey as a body of water, but as a living archive, a fluid witness to history, memory, and change. It holds within it the sediments of time—colonial trade routes, ancient crossings, ecological decline, whispered mythologies.
My representation of the Liffey is multisensory and often collaborative: through scent, sound, and material, I trace the river’s invisible currents. I record underwater vibrations as an attempt to listen to what the river remembers. I distil these sonic layers into installations, drawings, and compositions that reveal the tension between surface and depth, what is seen and what is felt.
In some works, the Liffey becomes a vessel for global entanglements: a route through which bodies, goods, and stories have moved.
I work with the river not to define it, but to be in conversation with it. Its changing states—tidal shifts, polluted flows, moments of stillness—mirror broader concerns in my practice around fragility, transformation, and the unseen.”
–Siobhan McDonald
