Our Collaboration

Our collaboration

Thanks to everyone who has taken an interest in our work! It is really great to hear from and connect with you!

A few people have asked about how an Irish artist and an Australian artist managed to start working together, why we choose to work together, and what each brings to the table...well, here is the story...

We have been working together since meeting in the United Kingdom in early 2011, both realising the potential to expand our work through the exploration of common themes and different mediums. Over this time we have refined our language of collaboration through small test pieces exploring the potential of marrying our distinct areas of practice. We rather annoyingly refer to ourselves as Team D...

Through photo-media and durational performance, Darragh explores content that is intensely personal, dealing with relationships, experience and the home in a way that is a contestation of gender, politics and space. David's work originates in music composition (including commissions for Symphony Australia and the ABC), audio-visual collaborations and, most recently, composition outside of the audible spectrum as a counterpoint to visual and performance installation. Individually our work is anchored in personal experience; as a collaborative entity it transcends any individual perspective, amplifying the emotional import of a universal human condition. Our back catalogues – the ‘Nimbus Vice’ series, Pink Cock Room, Jackhammered, Mucker (Darragh); The Joy of Loss, Todesfuge, Die Eigenheit, Domino Theory (David) – are personal revelations filtered through metaphor. As a team, we strive to develop a new language of communication that embraces photo-media, installation, performance, music and sound. This powerful combination takes the expressive power of our work to a new, distinctly original and innovative level, informed as it is also by literature.

We undertook a residency at Bundanon in April 2012 where we scoped and framed the concepts and elements of APHASIA and undertook extensive field recordings. Our investigations of installation in terms of co-dependent, convergent and immersive media, materials, themes, structures and concepts have built on our individual languages and created a potent third entity: a stripped-back new language that communicates more directly, distinctly and with less artifice and obstruction in the exploration of emotion and meaning.

In interrogating each other’s practice and unspoken assumptions, we have developed the grammar and syntax of a shared language – a process that continues despite working from opposite ends of the world. The intensity of our collaborative process remains undiluted across this geographical distance, bringing together our shared themes of emotional conflation, psychological trauma, contested space and, ultimately, redemption.

D&D

IMAGES © Lucy Parakhina