04.08.2025

On this episode of K7 dans la 4L, collaborative visual artist duo Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty share insights into their creative practice across performance, video, sound installation and storytelling.

Parked up at Drumcliff Cemetery and later on with a spectacular view of Ben Bulben, Niamh and Ruth talk to us about their ongoing research. Topics covered that day include, Edward Said’s idea of a ‘third nature’ in relation to the adjacent fallacies and contradictions inherent in Irish Literary Revival tropes via William Butler Yeats, and a grand French pop-ballad; Michel Sardou’s 1981 hit, Les Lacs du Connemara… inspired by a place he’d never visited.

Drawing narrative threads between a constellation of historical, academic and folkloric sources; referencing poetry, music, dance; Niamh and Ruth give insight into a long-term research project that, in their own words, ‘examines how decisions relating to preservation and presentation can shape national and individual identities, in the context of imperialism, late capitalism, rising ethno-nationalism and polarised public debate on both sides of the Atlantic’.

K7 dans la 4L is tour de force mobile broadcasting arts club, live streamed on Twitch with a curated series of artist’s talks, readings and interviews that were broadcast directly from the Renault 4. A forum for discourse and debate around contemporary culture, a chat room that was utilised to discuss art, landscape and tradition associatively and in a shared stream of consciousness. 

The interview is available to watch here…