Trish Morgan
Academic and digital practitioner

Digital Practice

Trish’s digital practice is concerned with communicating and representing environmental issues. She is influenced by ideas of praxis, often understood as theory and practice in action.

The environmental crisis has prompted Trish to consider some previously neglected skills as useful and valuable to communicating about the environment. Having a background in music, music technology and multimedia, she has returned to practice-based approaches to expressing ideas about environmental issues.

For Trish, the medium is less important than the message. She therefore approaches her practice through the digital means that are deemed most important or relevant to the environmental message she is communicating. Generally however, while her academic work is concerned with the systemic and structural aspects of environmental issues, she tends to favour the small, hidden, overlooked and sometimes unloved aspects of the Irish environment. Guided by ideas of biophilia (love of life) and topophilia (love of place), Trish’s work takes a local, place-based approach, often working close to the river Shannon in the Leitrim and Roscommon areas.

Currently, Trish works mostly with sound and lens-based media. In the past she has worked with graphic design, typography, acrylic painting and physical computing.

My Digital Practice
Sound Art

Trish’s sound works are often concerned with uncovering hidden nature. She likes to use hydrophones, parabolic microphones and stereo ORTF sets to reveal the hidden sounds of nature in Ireland.

5km from home
5km from home is a sonic response to the COVID-19 outbreak in Ireland in 2020. The recordings were made during…
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The Miracle of the One Thing
This was my first sustained return to praxis, having been a more ‘traditional’ academic, focusing on research projects and articles.…
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Photography

Trish’s photography work often expresses environmental issues and is frequently inspired by ideas of topophilia, biophilia and solastalgia.

The word topophilia comes from the Greek words topos, meaning “place” and -philia, meaning “love of”. It is therefore a love of a particular place. Trish’s work sometimes aims to communicate the love of small, anonymous, rural locations in
Ireland through digital photography.

Also to be seen in Trish’s work is the chronicling of biophilia, broadly meaning a love of living things. In her work, Trish attempts to evoke a connection with the wildlife of small, even insignificant places.

Solastalgia is a neologism describing the sadness or upset felt in relation to ecosystem distress. The philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined this term and described it as ‘the homesickness you have when you are still at home’. Through witnessing environmental damage close to home, a person can be solastalgic due to the change wrought by that damage. Trish’s work attempts to visually communicate the feeling of solastalgia.

Leaf
At the Still Point

Taken from a line in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, this project is a homage to water. Eliot’s masterpiece has long inspired me since I was a young teenager. A frenetic world made silent, yet, when stillness approaches, ‘there the dance is’.

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Solastalgia

As part of an ongoing enquiry, this project interrogates the concept of solastalgia. Solastalgia is a neologism describing the sadness, grief or loss felt in relation to ecosystem distress. This work attempts to visually communicate the feeling of solastalgia using photography.

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Calder Valley

Sometimes a project takes on a documentary tone, and while I was travelling in the UK for a conference, I got to explore the Calder Valley in Yorkshire, Ted Hughes country.

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Waterways

An ongoing theme of my work concerns the tension between first and second nature, that is the natural and built environment. This tension is within – I am the product of an urban environment.

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What speaks to the soul, escapes our measurements

Alexander von Humboldt, cartographer, adventurer, naturalist, renaissance man is the inspiration for the title of this collection. This collection is a sort of ‘artist’s choice’ of various works of nature photography.

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Mixed Media

While Trish usually takes a ‘sound first’ approach to her work, sometimes working with moving image can bring about a new perspective on an existing sound work, or can form part of a mixed media exploration. Her approach to mixed media is therefore organic, and guided by the sound and photography explorations. However, just as her sound and photography work is inspired by the overlooked or hidden aspects of nature, her moving image work uses underwater video and remote camera trap footage to capture hidden nature in ‘ordinary’ locations.

Fireweed

This piece evolved out of the original sound project of the same title. Its genesis was in an invite to exhibit the sound work at a symposium in April 2024, where accompanying visuals were welcome. I have been working with this woodland for the last three years, and felt that some imagery and moving image would help to situate the spoken word in the sound piece.

The Miracle

Having recoded the underwater sounds of the river Shannon for a year, which culminated in The Miracle of the One Thing, I was curious to see what was underneath the surface of the water. For this piece I remixed the recordings from June and set the sound piece to video. The Miracle became a moving image collage of the underwater landscapes from the locations where the sound was recorded.