Minute Bodies 6 channel video installation, audio 2025

In Minute Bodies, a scientist sifts through forams (single-celled organisms), plankton and brittlestars taken from an underwater site on the Arctic Ocean floor. As the scientist separates and examines these tiny creatures and the sediment’s they live amongst using a fine-tipped paintbrush, the microscopic samples sway vigorously in seawater solutions as a result of the research vessel’s roll and pitch on the waves . The artwork attests to a more-than-human history of visual observation, from Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1655) – the first major publication of the Royal Society, and the text that coined ‘cell’ as a biological term – to the bodies of brittlestars themselves as what philosopher-physicist Karen Barad calls an ‘ancient nanotechnology’ and a ‘living, breathing, metamorphosing optical system.’ While brittlestars do not have eyes, their skeletons contain calcite crystals that function as micro-lenses focusing light. Zooming in on these lives and their evolutionary processes, Minute Bodies asks how we look, and are looked at, in motion.

Kindly supported by an Arts Council of Ireland Project Award, Ocean Census and the Arctic University of Norway.