The film installation and performed ritual span across intertwined mythologies and oral traditions of storytelling from Ireland and Iceland. Skehan’s new film, “Imithe Leis An Taoide, (Gone With The Tide)” explores the island and nature reserve of Ireland’s Eye, off the coast of Dublin. In it she references the mythological island, ‘Uí Bhreasail’, or ‘Hy-breasal’. The changing tides and rough waters in her film remind us of the unsettling loss of connection to ‘home’, to the disappearing land due to climate change, to language and to ourselves.

Her opening ritual, a meditative story telling echos a body scan in which the viewer is invited to learn new perspectives of the self and body as a land. She references the disappearing oral tradition of Keening (Irish mourning song) and the Seanchaí (the traditional Irish storytelling). The ambient sound artist Masaya Ozaki composes a sonic response to Skehan’s collected biodata of Icelandic plants such as Dryas Octopetala, the national flower of Iceland that also grows in mountainous regions of Ireland.