Output details

'My Death', exhibition of audio work 8 min. 25 sec.

Commissioned for the Kilkenny Arts Festival, this looped audio work was created specifically to be sited in St. John’s Priory, a thirteenth-century Augustinian chapel. A male narrator, speaking in a dispassionate tone of voice, recounts a litany of flaws. Less negative, personal attributes are dispersed throughout the body of the monologue, but it is the narrator’s shortcomings that seem to dominate.

This research radically extended 2D photography practice such as McIntyre's, as it required extensive experimentation with audio and installational media, the use of an actor and consideration of questions of site-specificity. Locating this work within the context of a priory, the site itself brought a number of additional associations to the audio work, thus the piece was presented solely as an audio installation, with the building itself providing visual context.

This work investigated the juncture between interiority and exteriority, private and public, themes that are also prevalent within McIntyre's photographic practice. In particular, this research investigated the relationship between interior experience (the personal / psychological) and exterior space (the natural / phenomenological) with particular reference to cinematic and theatrical forms. In its use of language, the piece engages with writers and dramatists such as, Samuel Beckett and James Kelman.

Through its exhibition in a public venue, in an international arts festival, the piece connected with multiple specialist and general audiences. The experimentation carried out within the installational aspects of this research, led directly to the development of another body of research exhibited in a solo exhibition, ‘Silent, Empty, Waiting for the Day’, Belfast Exposed during 2011, in which McIntyre further established new parameters for presenting photography in conjunction with in installational media, an area of enquiry which has had little previous investigation.