homerun

From Steam to Screen is an Expanded Cinema installation, created in collaboration with Michael Higgins as part of the Welcome to the Neighbourhood international artists residency in Askeaton, Ireland. This sensory and experimental multi-screen installation explores the relationship between the train and cinema, both as technologies of movement and as vehicles of psychological and perceptual transportation.

Referencing Askeaton’s abandoned train line and the ephemeral traveling cinema that once visited the town in the 1960s, the installation engages with the experience of rail travel through filmed footage captured from the train’s perspective. Other projections translate the train’s movement into fragmented cinematic gestures—pulsing lights, flickering frames, and layered soundscapes—blurring the boundaries between external motion and internal perception. The rhythmic mechanics of the train—its sounds, momentum, and cyclical motion—parallel the flickering dynamics of film projection, creating a perceptual chamber where physical and psychological journeys converge.

A separate space within the installation showcases 35mm negatives created using a split-camera technique, capturing landscapes and horses along the rail track. The visual distortions—elongated animal bodies, fragmented terrain, and layered strips of motion—mirror not only cinema’s ability to distort, extend, and reconfigure time and space but also how movement shapes perception when looking out from a moving train. The horse, historically linked to early motion studies and the origins of cinema, becomes a spectral figure in this shifting landscape, caught between movement and stillness, presence and disappearance.

The installation also makes visible what is often hidden in traditional cinema: the act of projection itself. Light, shadow, and mechanical rhythms are not merely tools for storytelling but become active, performative elements that shape the viewing experience. The exposed projection process disrupts the illusion of seamless cinematic flow, emphasising the flickering rupture of frames, the tactile and material presence of film, and the kinetic interplay of light and darkness. Much like the train’s rhythmic motion, cinema operates through an oscillation between movement and stillness, immersion and rupture.

Through its multi-sensory and immersive approach, From Steam to Screen transforms the exhibition space into a site of perceptual instability, where cinematic time fractures and expands, pulling the viewer into a state of suspended transit—between past and present, real and imagined, dream and waking vision. By merging the mechanical with the hypnotic, the work turns film and train travel into parallel experiences of physical and psychological transportation, repetition, and disappearance.