Siobhán McDonald’s multifaceted exhibition explores Dublin Port’s deep history as a mutable landscape shaped by water, myth, and human intervention. Through film, sound, painting, and sculpture, the installation investigates how the city’s shifting ground holds memory and resilience. Drawing from collaborations with underwater archeologists, historians, and scientists, SHAPESHIFTER traces the interdependence of human and more-than-human worlds, revealing the city as a living organism — breathing, eroding, reforming.

By weaving together soundscapes, imagery, and environmental research, McDonald offers an atmospheric meditation on place and change — a reminder that the boundaries between solid and fluid, human and elemental, are always in motion.

The exhibition includes PASSAGE, a brand new work, developed through the artist’s European Commission–supported S+T+ARTS4WaterII residency at Dublin Port. A short film and sound work, it responds to a 19th-century shipwreck recently uncovered along the Irish coast.

The soundscape for PASSAGE is rooted in a collaboration with Professor Chris Bean of Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies (DIAS) and pioneering fibre optic research that opens up new frontiers in oceanic seismic sensing – and features a soundscape by internationally acclaimed Icelandic artists Markéta Irglová and Sigor Ros, with text by Irish poet, Moya Cannon.

SHAPESHIFTER invites audiences to listen closely to the hidden currents beneath the city and to imagine Dublin not as fixed ground, but as a dynamic threshold between land and water.

This work was realized in part within the framework of the S+T+ARTS 4Water II residency programme by the ADAPT Centre at Dublin City University and Beta Festival with the support from Dublin Port, Dublin City Council, Smart Dublin, Waterways Ireland, Irish Maritime Development Office and the S+T+ARTS programme of the European Union.

Siobhán McDonald was born in New York. She lives and works in Dublin.
Siobhán works with natural materials, withdrawing them from their cycles of generation, growth and decay. This process gives form to a range of projects which consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time. Her artworks make use of natural phenomena and technologies to stage poetic and philosophical engagements between people and their natural world. Beginning with a specific site of investigation, Siobhán weaves diverse narratives into visual stories, often inviting nature itself to participate in the creative process. Her research-driven practice employs a distinctive artistic language to express intangible processes, utilising painting, drawing, film, and sound.

Image credit: Courtesy of The National Monuments Service, Ireland