The title of this work is borrowed from the novel A Time in Rome by Elizabeth Bowen and conceptualises the corporeal experience of knowing a place:

The knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather. Substantiality comes through touch and smell, and taste, the tastes of different dusts.

When it comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence. Nothing is more real than the first wall you lean up against sobbing with exhaustion. […] Seeing is pleasure, but not knowledge.

To calculate the energy of gas, vapour or mist an average must be estimated – there are millions of molecules, numbers too large to comprehend. Yet our bodies automatically react and hair follicles stand on end when there is a drop in temperature. Dots of lichen change in pigment and shape according to the toxins in the air and stone faces on churches begin to dissolve due to acid rain. These are different forms of knowledge that inform changes in climate and the intellectual, corporeal or expert knowledge are all validated measurements. However it is having an ability to attune oneself to these signals or a cognitive dissonance to them that can determine our responsiveness to climate change.

Chloe Brenan Different Dusts 2021 Super 8mm film (digitised), sound Duration: 6 minutes 51 seconds

Credits | Text: Chloe Brenan | Theremin: Philip Christie, Chloe Brenan | Synthesizer: Philip Christie | Drums: Jim Christie | Narration: Sarah Edmondson | Soundscape remixed from the track I’m in There by experimental music project The Bonk |

Link to voice over script

Chloe Brenan’s practice combines moving image, photography, sound, print and writing. She explores the simultaneous engagement of the corporeal and the intellect, and the reciprocity between both, that enhances our ability to be responsible and responsive to the world’s patternings and murmurings. On one side there is our ability to measure and model, on the other our somatic capacity to tacitly experience, infer and intuit. The porosity of the body and its indivisibility from its environs is a recurring concern. Works often involve close examinations of the poetic haptics of daily life and processes on the edge of perception that question boundaries between bodies, intimate spaces and the wider environment.

Chloe Brenan lives and works in County Carlow and Dublin. She holds a Bachelor in Fine Art (distinctions) and a Masters from the Department of Fine Art Media both from the National College of Art and Design. Additionally, she holds a Postgraduate Diploma (distinctions) awarded from the Department of Philosophy at University College Cork. She has received support for her practice from The Arts Council of Ireland, Thomas Dammann Junior Memorial Trust, Culture Ireland, Carlow County Council and ArtLinks. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally including VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow; Periphery Space, Wexford; Galway Arts Centre; The Library Project, Dublin; Catalyst Arts, Belfast; The Estonian Museum of Applied Arts and Design, Tallinn; as well as in print at Dublin Art Book Fair 2019; Tokyo Art Book Fair, Japan; and I Never Read Art Book Fair, Basel. She has had work published by REPLIKA Publishers, Berlin; and The Outside Press, Dublin. Her work is included in the collections of 100Archive, Ireland; Reminders Photography Stronghold, Tokyo, Japan; New Zealand Audio Foundation, Zine and Art Book Collection, Auckland, New Zealand; and MoMA Library Artist Publication Collection, New York.

Image: Chloe Brenan, Different Dust, 2021, Film still, Super 8mm film (digitised), sound Duration: 6 minutes 51 seconds.