Limerick City Gallery of Art (LCGA) is delighted to present LAST ACT, a new commission, by Marie Hanlon & Rhona Clarke. LASTACT is a large-scale synchronised video installation made in collaboration with composer Rhona Clarke. The work presents the climate crises as something both real and abstract, as such it mirrors the human response to a changing earth.

Weather events make up most of the visual material with real footage of drought, flooding, wildfires and melting ice slowly building towards a wide screen shot of dark engulfing waters towards the finish. The weather sequences are bookended by seemingly unrelated imagery of empty industrial type spaces; doors and shutters open to blank whiteness at the start then close to a final darkness at the end. The reference here is to our industrial past and present, an attempt to visually link industrial production with the climate crises. There is also a suggestion of theatrical space where we watch something being enacted in an unreal world that is not our immediate reality. Many would agree that climate denial has given way to a more general acceptance that things are changing, but for many this is far into the future and life can go on much as before. I have chosen to focus on weather events since these are part of everyday experience and a means of alerting us to change happening right now.

Visual material is black and white devoid of humans and animals, a conscious attempt to present familiar imagery in a way that is different from daily news reporting. The pace and rhythm of the work is calibrated towards slowness. Imagery is not extreme or overly sensational. For some the work may hold the contradictory aspects of beauty and dread. In this sense it could be related to ‘the terrible beauty’ of W.B. Yeats poem The Second Coming.