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Seeing Colours in an Oil Slick (3mins 37sec, 2014) was commissioned for installation in a former coal-processing plant in a coal mining town in Hokkaido, Japan. It reflects on our consumption of energy, with scenes being filmed in former mining areas in Dublin and Wicklow and a semi-active bogland in Cavan.
The figure traverses the remnants of energy mining on the Irish landscape, dressed in an absurd and disposable paper suit. The figure acts as a conduit between consumption, desire, the environment and pollution, while simultaneously being consumed and discarded alongside the remnants of the consumed mines. He is dragged along the ground, hosed down on a pile of turf and wood, lies in a river polluted with ochre leaking from a mine which ceased operation in 1864, until finally a radioactive-coloured cloud surrounds his impassive face.
The title is a reference to a sentence in Yukio Mishima’s Spring Snow (part of The Sea of Fertility); “Once the churning water has settled to a calm surface, you can see the rainbow oil slick floating there. And that’s the way it will be. After we’re all dead, it will be easy to analyse us and isolate our basic elements for everyone to see.”
Commissioned by the Sorachi Coal Mine project for the Sapporo International Art Festival, in association with CAI02 Contemporary Art Institute Sapporo
