Shane Finan
Shane Finan
Bio: Shane Finan (he/them) assembles artworks and projects from interactive contemporary technologies, found objects, and traditional artistic media. Their work is as both artist and creative producer on collaborative projects. It is research based and explores the impact of technologies on rural places.
Shane always collaborates, most recently working with and learning from artists, plankton, environmental scientists, fungi and biologists. In their practice, Shane develops collaborative projects with artists, researchers, and other partners. This has included establishing and co-running the collective artist workspace and community space ^ in Manorhamilton (2022-26), where they coordinated collaborative artistic research projects. They co-founded 'Levels of Compromise' in 2024, a nationwide collective of artists who work with critical technologies.
Recent awards include the Arts Council of Ireland Individual Bursary Award (2023), Artists Workspace Scheme (2024, 2023, 2022), Agility Award (2022, 2021, 2020). Other awards include South Dublin County Council In Context Public Art Award (2026), Creative Ireland funding (2024, 2020), Culture Ireland funding (2021, 2018).
Artwork Description and Title of Work: CPR
An interactive installation about the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR), a device invented in 1925 on board the RRS Discovery by artist-scientist Sir Alister Hardy. The artwork tells a combined story of the history of the device and its continued use in plankton data monitoring today.
After reading about the design and implementation of the mechanical technology in the 1920s, Shane visited the Marine Biological Association (MBA) in Plymouth, UK, where the device is still built and maintained and where plankton data is collected and counted. He spoke to the team of researchers there, before returning to Ireland and meeting with researchers at the Irish Marine Institute to talk about how they use the plankton research from the MBA.
The artwork is a seven-part poem with accompanying video and installation about the history of data and technology. It draws from one main source – Sir Alister Hardy's book 'Great Waters', which documented the team's research in the southern oceans in the 1920s. 'Great Waters' referenced many phenomena of data capture in the field, and also poetically told of Hardy's love for living creatures, particularly the whales that rely on plankton. In the book, he likens the decimation of whale populations in the northern oceans to the poem 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1834), where sailors become trapped in an unmoving sea after an act of cruelty toward an albatross.
This artwork reimagines Coleridge's poem and Hardy's prose for the 21st Century, where so many acts of cruelty have frozen us all in time. It is a speculative fiction about what data collection and environmental science can help us uncover not only in scientific terms, but in poetic and artistic work.
Website: https://shanefinan.org
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