Fiona Brehony Explores Gloucester Harbor, Whale Song, and the Living Memory of Water

GOETEMANN ARTIST RESIDENCY BRINGS MANCHESTER-BASED ARTIST AND WRITER TO GLOUCESTER

OPENING TALK: THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 10 / (RNAC 5-6 PM)
OPEN STUDIO: THURSDAY 2-4 PM 9/17 (OCEAN ALLIANCE)
WALK/LISTEN: THURSDAY 9/24 2-4 PM (OCEAN ALLIANCE)
CLOSING TALK: THURSDAY 10/1 4-5 PM (OCEAN ALLIANCE)
Gloucester, MA – What can water remember? What stories are held within a harbor, a river, or an ocean and whose stories are we able to hear?

These questions are at the heart of the work of artist and writer Fiona Brehony, the current Goetemann Artist-in-Residence at Rocky Neck Art Colony. Based in Manchester, Britain, Brehony works across moving image, sound, and performance, collaborating with scientists, composers, historians, and communities to create poetic and inquisitive works that explore the relationships between people, places, and waterways.

During her residency in Gloucester, Brehony is turning her attention to Gloucester Harbor, exploring the harbor as both a natural ecosystem and a human-made infrastructure. Her work is informed by historian Richard White’s concept of the “organic machine” – a landscape that is simultaneously natural and shaped by human activity. This idea offers a way of approaching the harbor not as a backdrop, but as a complex living system in which water, industry, infrastructure, human communities, and other species are continually shaping one another.

Brehony’s approach of thinking with water considers water not simply as a subject or environment, but as a material that connects bodies, places, histories, and species. Drawing on Astrida Neimanis’s concept of Bodies of Water, she is interested in the ways human bodies are already materially entangled with the waters around them. In Gloucester, this raises questions about how we might listen to a harbor as bodies already implicated in its waters – and how whale song, human voices, harbor infrastructure, and the movement of water might become part of a shared, though uneven, ecological and acoustic body.

Her residency includes a collaboration with Ocean Alliance, engaging with the organization’s extensive archives of whale song to develop poetic work on the ocean’s presence and the waters shared with whales. Brehony is exploring the ocean as a living archive – one that carries ecological history, community memory, and evidence of the ways human and non-human lives intersect.
“Water can hold histories that we don’t know how to access,” Brehony says. “I’m interested in what happens when we listen closely to a place, and in what might emerge when those acts of listening become collective.”

The residency extends ideas developed through Brehony’s ongoing Liquid History project, workshops and soundwalks approaching rivers as living archives of social and ecological memory, previously focused on the River Irk in North Manchester. In Gloucester, that inquiry expands from river to harbor and ocean, where the scale of water – and the number of lives entangled within it – becomes harder to grasp.

The public is invited to a series of gatherings and events during her time in Gloucester.

Brehony is an AHRC-funded doctoral candidate researching the River Irk in North Manchester as a living site of cultural heritage and has spent this summer as artist in residence with the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research in Oslo, developing Water Symphony, following the city’s fjord, rivers, and waterways as a medium for exploring urban justice.

Her work has been commissioned by the Whitworth Art Gallery, the University of Oxford, PRiSM at the Royal Northern College of Music, and Creswell Crags Museum, and supported by Arts Council England and the AHRC.
The Goetemann Artist Residency Program is a program of Rocky Neck Art Colony, bringing contemporary artists to Gloucester to engage with the community, explore the region’s rich cultural and environmental landscape, and develop new work in response to place.

For more information about Fiona Brehony’s residency, upcoming public programs, and the Goetemann Artist Residency Program, visit Rocky Neck Art Colony at rockyneckartcolony.org.