Ghost Signals 1 & 2

February / March 2008
Ormeau Baths Gallery and Limerick University, as part of Two Places exhibition Curated by Seán McCrum

Ghost Signals is a two-part site-specific sculptural installation in a collaborative attempt to establish a creative link between Belfast and Limerick, the two key locations of the project and points of potential communication. Over a three-month time span, sonic and visual raw material consisting of sound recordings, drawings, photographs and video footage was gathered by the artists from and in between both sites. These recorded materials were then edited and composed into short audiovisual pieces. Working through the collected raw material, the artists would often choose parts of the recordings that others would discard because of faults or digital artefacts, i.e. hiss, clips, wind noise on the microphone or interference of a mobile phone signal. The layering and amplification of these mistakes becomes part of the very fabric of these compositions that serve as the building blocks of the two sculptural installations.

“Ghost Signals by Anthony Kelly and David Stalling is appropriately ghostly, and it resembles what we have come to expect in the field of sculptural installation, not least because it employs a large number of television monitors scattered across a darkened space. They flicker in and out of life, creating a sense of interaction and expectation. It’s atmospherically quite powerful.”

Aidan Dunne, review of Two Places, The Irish Times, February 4th 2008