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the spiritual, and getting people beyond what he
finds to be the insular “ego-centric” nature of humans that seeks to detach itself from the environment, which has dictated his work for the past thirty years. For the past two of those years, Paul has been working on the 26-minute-long nonnarrative filmic experience Against the Waning Light, about life around us, that connects the deep ocean to our everyday scenery. “I had taken a trip,” Paul says of how the idea was born. “I decided to learn how to scuba dive, and I was sitting at the bottom of the Red Sea, and I felt as if I was being observed, and I mentioned it to some of the other divers when I came up, and they said, ‘Oh, that’s an awareness of presence. You feel the presence,’ and I Visual Arts Project Award that gave me the money to be able to develop and fund it, and make it, so I’m very thankful for that. It’s been a long time before I could get this sort of funding, and I’ve been working for about thirty years doing this sort of thing, and it’s very hit-or-miss.” Paul believes that collaboration is a critical aspect of his art, and for Against the Waning Light, beyond Nina, he also enlisted the talents of cinematographer Cindy Cummins and the underwater cinematographer Federico Buzzoni, who worked on the Netflix documentary The Deepest Breath and was a friend of Nina’s after filming some material for her. “Without those people, there’s no way I would be able to make this work,” Paul asserts. Paul edited and scored the film himself, with post-production wrapping in June. Although Paul says that this won’t be the final final version of the film, as he plans to keep reediting it until his passing. Against the Waning Light premiered at The Marine Institute in Galway on September 19th, as part of the “A Night To Sea” event for was like, ‘God, that’s an amazing idea!’ “I was still blown away by the fact that you could sit underwater! I had never scuba’d before! It was so beautiful there – the colours, and the forms of the fish, and all that sort of stuff – that I decided to write a piece of music about it. Then it evolved into the idea of making a film. “I thought of Nina McGowan, who’s a friend of mine and is also an artist and musician, and she’s a world-champion freediver, as well. So, I thought she’d be the perfect person for it, so I constructed a journey from the deep abyss of the ocean, up through the deserts, and into the Irish mountains, which is where it ends. “But it’s connecting the sentience of the deep ocean to the intelligence of the forest. The things that are under our feet. The things that are under the sea that we know nothing about. We hardly explore it, you know? We’re always thinking about space; we rarely seem to think about this world that we don’t know much about underneath our feet.” Against the Waning Light was funded by the Arts Council, a rare experience for Paul, who typically relies on self-funding for his works, but which helped the project materialise. “When I first made art, I never even thought about applying for money for it, you know?” Paul says. “When you form bands, you don’t think about applying for money to run a band; you just figure out ways of doing it. You’re still making art, you know? “I mean, with this one, I gotta say, this is fully-funded by the Irish Arts Council. It’s a 26 Culture Night. . “It will be shown in Dublin before the end of the year,” Paul declares. “I’m talking to two venues at the moment. I kind of want to have an outdoor, large-scale [event] if we can. That’s the plan. “I want to move outside of the gallery space, and not just always be talking to a similar audience. I think that if I can spread it out to different areas, and have it pop up in different places… it sounds capitalistic, but it’s not. This will always be shown for free, basically. So, everything that I’ve mentioned that we’ll be doing will be open to any audience for free.” For screening info visit paulmurnaghan.com.