Mark MacElhinney is a final year Fine Art student and Irish Artist, with a particular interest in video work and painting. His work explores the idea of the landscape and the human connection to it. His practice is heavily orientated around one's identity, and the association of the human and their relationship to the environments around them. His work seeks to manifest his innate curiosity and relationship to the landscapes that surround him.
This collection of videos, titled ‘the Sun and the Crane’, centres around a figure entering an environment, moving through it, before coming to rest upon an elevated surface, observing his landscape and resting, and then ultimately leaving. The footage works in a cyclic nature, focusing on the recurring imagery of this area while the figure journeys through it. Seven segments are played back-to-back, with marginal cuts between each, to represent the transition from one day to another, giving the impression of a stereotypical week and the contents by which, each day typically possesses. The footage is displayed in black and white to reflect the thematic devices presented within each segment, while text is also utilised, being placed upon specific footage, directly referencing and providing a commentary to the relatively silent visual, only accompanied by the raw audio of the footage.
The key ideas at play within this footage are the exploration of the human and the landscape. The location of the footage creates an interesting discussion, with the urban and natural environments encountering one another, which is something in particular that the artist found particularly interesting. His work seeks to manifest his innate curiosity and relationship to the landscapes that surround him. In doing so, his hopes are to create an engaging, yet slowly paced film, where the viewer is encouraged to engage their emotion. The shots are purposely overtly long, and in doing so, subverts the viewers expectations of a cut away, and rather forces the viewer to engage with the frame more, analysing it in a greater detail. The use of black and white serves to help further engage the emotional, somewhat melancholic nature of the footage, and in doing so exaggerate the thematic devices.