‘Live Landscapes’ – Solo Exhibition and Publication/CD by Mícheál Keating

‘Live Landscapes’ – Solo Exhibition and Publication/CD by Mícheál Keating. Photo: Graham Patterson

Limerick-based musician and media artist Mícheál Keating presents his debut solo exhibition ‘Live Landscapes’

Limerick-based musician and media artist Mícheál Keating presents his debut solo exhibition, Live Landscapes, a project developed over five years of engagement with the rural landscape of County Limerick.

Working through processes of musical improvisation, field recording, photography, video, and writing, Keating’s practice reflects a sustained and evolving dialogue with place. The exhibition opens at Spacecraft, Mungret Court, Limerick on Friday July 18th from 7-9pm, and will be open July 19-20th from 11am-5pm

The exhibition considers the landscape of County Limerick as a site of both familiarity and strangeness—foregrounding themes of hauntology, immanence, and becoming. Keating’s work traces entanglements between human, non-human, and land, offering a multi-sensory reflection on presence, time, and ecology.

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Live Landscapes also marks the release of a new publication and accompanying album of the same name. The 108-page book features 120mm landscape photography and was produced in collaboration with designer Hugh Heffernan. The photographs, much like the exhibition, approach the Limerick countryside with a sense of quiet attention and open-ended observation.

The album comprises 18 improvised recordings made by Keating in outdoor locations across County Limerick. Combining voice and electroacoustic sound with field recordings, these performances unfold in direct relation to their surroundings, permeated by sounds of birds, cars, wind and machinery. Rather than treating the landscape as backdrop, the work invites the listener to encounter it as collaborator.

Taken together, the exhibition, publication, and album reflect a desire to cultivate attentiveness to the complexity of land and place. Keating’s work engages with landscape not as something to be met and listened to—something continually in process. “I hope that through this project, the people of County Limerick will experience these familiar landscapes in a new light, and see land not simply as something to be owned or extracted from, or a stage for human drama to unfold, but as a complex, beautiful, scary, unknowable web of entanglements, constantly in the process of development.”

Mícheál Keating is a musician and media artist from a dairy farming background in Knockaderry, County Limerick, now based in Limerick City. His practice spans sound composition, improvisation, performance, photography, video, writing, and generative systems. He synthesises these elements into multimedia explorations of the rural landscape of Limerick.

Keating previously released two critically acclaimed LPs as the singer, songwriter, and producer of the art-rock band Bleeding Heart Pigeons (2008–2020). He currently performs with improvised noise collective Péist, post-rock band The Low Field, and singer-songwriter Laura Duff. He is also active as a music producer, media art technician, and festival organiser with Féile na Gréine.