Áine O’Dwyer is an artist whose work is concerned by both the conceptual idioms of sound-art and traditional compositional techniques, embracing the broader aesthetics of sound and its relationship to environment, time, audience and structure.
O’Dwyer’s work has been informed by her study of the individual idiosycracies found in each pipe-organ and notably her realisation that each individual organ is meticulously tuned to the measurements of the building in which it is housed, allowing it to connect intimately with its surrounding architecture. Poems for Daedalus (2018), was a series of site-specific performances that O’Dwyer developed in Athens, based on the exploration of a building and its intimacies as well as the surrounding neighbourhood.
Similarly, the notion of the “holding space as extension-of-instrument” can be seen in works such as Accompaniment for Captives (Open Ear Festival, 2019), another site-specific performance. Taking place on Sherkin Island in Ireland, it centred around two local fishing boats, creating an “environmental tapestry where land, sea, man and animal were woven into one symphonic whole.”