Jony Easterby returns to Dublin Fringe Festival 2023 with his second spectacular outdoor light and sound installation, after the huge success of last year's Remnant Ecologies.
He tells RTE Culture about his inspiration of his latest night-time experience at the Botanic Garden of Ireland, The Garden of Shadows.
Darkness and light and the intensity in between define many of the ideas in this new show.
As an artist I have been fascinated and charmed in equal measure by the creative possibilities of shadows and the emotional response that light and dark brings, in intensity, form, colour and reflection.
I have been working for a number of years to explore how the manipulation of light and how the apparent simplicity of this process can create infinite complexity within analogue processes.
The whole of our perception and the rhythm of our lives is ruled by shadows, from diurnal cycles to cloudy days, seasons and weather.
Even by day gardens are ruled by shadow and when we started to explore them at night with sharp focussed torches, a new world where size, form and colour were flattened, expanded and distorted in equal measure.
The seminal essay 'In Praise of Shadows' by Tanizaki was a watershed moment for me as an exploration of the quality of light and shadow, finding beauty, not in the object itself, but in its shadow.
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Listen: The Garden Of Shadows - Jony Easterby talks to RTÉ Arena
A residency in Sidney Nolan’s Jacobean old farm located on the English-Welsh border near the picturesque Welsh market town of Presteigne. It’s a building without functioning electricity and it taught me to fall in love with the quality of natural light and its shifting quality within the dark rooms, where on sunny days the trees and shrubs would cast beautiful shifting shadows across the walls of the library - ‘The Garden of Shadows’ became apparent. Gardens are a study in light and shade affecting plant selection, growth patterns, temperature and seasonal change and ecological balance.
Each area of the National Botanic Gardens of Ireland presents itself as a borrowed landscape of light, shade and surface to place the works I have been making for this new installation of mine.
For me, my work acts as a catalyst for personal change alongside a way of calming my anxiety about the future of our ourselves and our environment.
As a keen plantsman and grower I have started to cultivate and collect plants which I think create exceptional shadows. These are used in the works along with wild collected plants. Using video and analogue LED lighting, I am playing with the aesthetics of form, colour, intensity and framing within the form of dynamic light paintings.
Working with the gardens has allowed me to explore and photograph specimens from the herbarium, an incredible collection of dried pressed plants collected over the past two hundred and fifty years. These have been montaged into video work of constantly shifting forms and colours.
This work is a celebration of the close observation of both flora and fauna for the sake beauty and curiosity, but underlying much of my thought lies a deep sense of loss through my constant solastalgia (distress caused by environmental change).
Perhaps another case of darkness shadowing behind the light?
For me, my work acts as a catalyst for personal change alongside a way of calming my anxiety about the future of our ourselves and our environment.
This show also gives the company a chance to work in some spectacular and beautiful environments such as the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin. Over the past year and a half I have been able to visit the gardens in all seasons and get to know some of the amazing and very generous folk who nurture the gardens and collections there.
Then when the gates shut and everyone has gone home we get to be in the garden as the shadow of the earth brings on the night!
The Garden of Shadows premieres at the National Botanic Gardens of Ireland, Glasnevin as part of Dublin Fringe Festival from 14th – 24th September - find out more here.
