RTÉ

Coming from inland West Cork originally, I noticed when I first moved to Baltimore almost 12 years ago, that my eyes were continually drawn to the land behind the house rather than the sea in front of us. Maybe I was out of my element. But gradually, over time, my eyes drifted to the sea. In 2017, I made a half hour film, Twilight, which was funded by the Arts Council of Ireland. I filmed the evening sky behind the hills over the course of two years on perhaps fifty different evenings. It’s not so much that I’m a perfectionist, far from it, but I think I just enjoyed the experience of filming so much that I didn’t want to stop – absorbing the light and the way the sound slowly changed. I’ve had a very similar experience with ‘The Sea’. I didn’t want this film to have any sense of exile from the world, or any sense of anxiety. I wanted it to feel as if the world was taking long deep breaths and we were breathing with it. I actually began before ‘lockdown’ but the restrictions allowed for a far greater concentration. Restrictions can be liberating. It was, for the most part, just me and a camera. All of the material is shot within a few hundred yards of the house. Some of it even just inside the door, out of the gales. The ships and boats pass by, high up on the sea - they appear distant and close simultaneously, shifting and still all at once.