Aonlaith
I am Pól McLernon, an Irish artist and researcher whose practice has unfolded across architecture, sound, performance, and the quieter territories of embodied attention. For many years I have moved between the Royal Opera House in London, Neolithic chambers in Orkney, the contested waters of Lough Neagh, and the alpine valleys of Valais, never settling into a single profession or trajectory. My work concerns resonance — the way vibration, space, and presence shape perception and, perhaps, the very architectures of thought. I am interested in instruments that listen: a floating cabin, a neo-neolithic chamber, the slow calibration of body and landscape. Achievements, such as they are, remain provisional: performances, installations, and investigations that prefer to remain open rather than concluded.
There are places that continue, long after the names given, change…
The northern shore of Lough Neagh is one such place.
For several years I have returned there with microphones, drawings, instruments and notebooks. None has proved sufficient on its own. The lake has shown little preference between them.
Together they have come to be known as AONLAITH.
A room is proposed. Its name - Nebenraum ALP.
At its centre stands a concert grand piano.
The room belongs to an older family of places: the composer's cabins, where music entered into conversation with weather, woodland and changing light. Mahler understood this. Sibelius, Wittgenstein understood this too. The piano is not placed there as an object to be admired, but as another body through which the landscape may speak and be answered.
Elsewhere the work takes different forms.
A resonant voice returns to a chamber at Maeshowe, Orkney.
A recorder is carried back to the same stretch of shoreline after rain.
Trees are planted beside the lake.
Nothing insists that these belong together.
It is enough that they recognise one another.
There is an old habit of imagining, looking. Follies underscore this vision of a poetic interaction with the land.
The work does not attempt to resolve that possibility.
It simply tries to remain in its company.
AONLAITH simply gathers around a place.
From that, correspondences continue to appear: between chamber and shoreline; between composition and weather; between stone, memory and voice; between those who arrive, and leave, carrying questions. Energetic exchanges…
Whether correspondences are discovered or composed is less important than returning often enough to recognise them.
LINA matters.
Not because it promises a centre, because it allows distant landscapes to enter into conversation without surrendering their own languages. I hope to bring AONLAITH into that conversation, and to discover what questions the stones have not yet thought to ask.