I am a composer, musician and radio producer, and in this exposition I explore how I brought my artistic practice into dialogue with a cartographic approach called deep mapping to create a sound installation called ECOTONE: A Sonic Journey Through Kildimo-Pallaskenry. Deep mapping encompasses the discursive and ideological dimensions of a place, such as memories, imaginations and the multiple realities that exist in our surroundings (Bodenhamer et al. 2015; Roberts 2016; Biggs and Modeen 2020).

This exposition invites you to reflect on the various things you do in your doctoral artistic research and to consider how these activities might form an interconnected system — a methodology. In a guided tour of words, images, and visits to my garden, I reconsider several research models I encountered as a PhD student investigating transdisciplinary performing practices. However, my primary aim is to carve out a pathway — from model to metaphor — one that offers a viable means of seeing your doctoral project existing within a terrain of complexity rather than utter chaos.

Katharine Normans’ work Making Place for instrument/s with live electronics (2013/16) combines recorded sounds, images, text, live interactive processing and instrumental music performance to create a unique experience of place. As the performer, I can choose a location, collect photographic images and recorded sounds, and interpret and re-create the score. The score is semi-improvisatory, consisting of many composed and freely pitched musical gestures which trigger text, visual animations and sound processing.