We Lose Sight of the Night

We Lose Sight of the Night is the first in a series of exhibitions which address climate and environmental change commissioned by the MAC Belfast and curated by Hugh Mulholland. O’Beirn (born in Galway) is a Belfast based artist, her practice explores the relationship between art and science and manifests variously as sculpture, installation, animation and site-specific projects.

This major survey exhibition across all three of the MAC galleries brings together new commissioned works and reworked older pieces made over the last two decades. An interest in the wonders and political importance of the night sky characterises much of this exhibition, where stars are celebrated as the ultimate recycling plants and where our right to the nighttime environment is highlighted and explored.

Using both traditional means such as drawing and animations as well as a range of absurd sculptural devices, O’Beirn explores the celestial as an ecologically active agent in urgent need of protection and preservation from the ravages of aggressive short term economic opportunism. Projects have investigated ideas around entropy, order, disorder and balance exploring how laypersons try to understand scientific and mathematical ideas in political terms.

For billions of years, all life has relied on Earth’s predictable rhythm of day and night. It’s encoded in the DNA of all plants and animals. Humans have radically disrupted this cycle by lighting up the night.

Plants and animals depend on Earth’s daily cycle of light and dark to govern life-sustaining behaviours such as reproduction, nourishment, sleep, and protection from predators.
Scientific evidence suggests that artificial light at night has negative and deadly effects on many creatures, including amphibians, birds, mammals, insects, and plants.