RIAI Student Awards

Winner: Clodagh Cloughlan (SAUL)

Essay Title: ‘ Being There’

‘Being there’ is a poetic response to one of the masterpieces by land artist James Turrell – ‘Sky Garden’ at Lis Ard Estate outside Skibbereen in West Cork.  Clodagh wrote the piece “to understand a meditative experience; and to communicate the relationship between conscious thought, scale, materiality and the movement of the body”.  In her evocative poem, she has beautifully recreated a journey of mind and body through the incredible space that is Sky Garden.  The poem offers a highly sensory experience as we follow the poet’s eyes, ears, touch and breath on their journey through thick woodland, a dark tunnel, a deep crater … and into the light.