David Bickley / Hina Kahn

SALT

Moving Image

This is a recent body of work commissioned by Cork County Council under the Creative Ireland scheme — This project explores ideas of liminality with reference to borders both within landscape & cultural identity. David is an audiovisual artist based in Cork for the last 25 years and Hina is a visual artist of Pakistani heritage who came to Ireland as a refugee. Both David’s and Hina’s work has a history of addressing this theme, and when the two met while in residence at Uillinn they formed the basis of this project. Taking a salt marsh in West Cork, as core location they commissioned local inventor Elgin Loane to take some exploratory aerial shots of the marsh. These bear a remarkable resemblance to satellite images of the Pakistan / Indian border which has featured in much of Hina’s work. Hina drew some ideas around these and David developed some animations and video art / sound design. The idea of this project is to develop these themes to produce an immersive installation that explores themes of belonging, identity and geographical borders. The marsh itself is a truly liminal space, it exists between the sea and the land, much as migrants do, and using this as a canvas on which to draw connective lines of community.