Cliona Harmey
Cliona Harmey
Bio: Cliona Harmey is an artist and educator who works primarily with media technologies and sculpture. In her artwork she works with technologies at a range of different scales, going from large scale public art works using live data (Dublin Ships) to much smaller ephemeral/modular system based works for galleries or other contexts. In her most recent practice she has made work which responds to contexts and situations where the global and local intersect (climate, borders, transit, maps). She is currently a lecturer in the Media Department at NCAD.
Title: Gnomon 1
Project Description: The work explores ecological awareness through solar-powered, low-energy modular media devices that foreground intermittency, frugality, and care, emphasising human observation rather than seamless automation. Reflecting on scale (from hyperlocal to global) and time (diurnal and seasonal cycles), it engages historical and contemporary Met Éireann datasets while recalling the human observers once positioned behind meteorological instruments. By contrasting embodied perception with machine sensing, the project re-situates weather as a lived experience. Technically, it employs a solar-powered ESP32 “gnoman” device that records daily shadow data to produce long-term visual traces, alongside analogue and digital prompt objects that invite collaborative climate reflection and writing. An additional small-scale work may incorporate a tipping bucket rain gauge, activated only when rainfall is detected.
