I also engaged in a small experiment visually while there with a local tour guide of Ireland’s sacred sites. The Burren has a 12th-century castle on-site—nothing too boisterous, it looks much like a rook on a chessboard. I am thinking these days about what makes a site sacred, and how these spaces are utilized cross culturally. I think of bells and gongs, how sound is almost always used to signify that a specific time in a space has arrived.

So we went to each floor of this ostensibly “regular” castle—with no spiritual significance—and then took tuning forks to the ground on each floor. When a turning fork is connected to another material is turns that material in a gigantic tuning fork, so that everything vibrates at the same frequency. We did this thinking about turning things like a nonsignificant castle into a sacred space, wondering if that happens just momentarily or if these repeated actions would potentially create a sacred site where originally there was none. Below, you can watch the video of one of our experiments:

The time I spent in Ireland has allowed my work to take an interesting turn toward the mystical, a direction which I have been trying to find within it but struggling with. It has driven home the importance that location can play in creating new directions for yourself and tunneling into an idea in concentrated time periods. Actually, I think that is the value of residencies in general—the ability to pursue ideas within concentrated time periods in the support of an institutional framework with the resources available.