Commissioned in 2020 by Crash Ensemble, November Music, and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, TERRARIUM was written during Ann’s time as composer in residence with Crash Ensemble. TERRARIUM is an immersive experience highlighting the changing geological terrain at Lough Boora, Offaly, Ireland. A sonic & visual immersive experience created by Ann Cleare, Laura Sheeran, and Lay of the Land, performed by Crash Ensemble.

TERRARIUM aurally and visually transports its audience through the specific yet universal touch stones of the Irish Bog-lands to a vanished Mesolithic Lake in Lough Boora, county Offaly, which, dated to between 6800 and 6500 BC, is thought to be one of the earliest sites of human activity in Ireland. Like many Post-Industrial landscapes in the world today, the geology of the Irish Midlands is vital to the material structures of our wider contemporary existence, as well as to collective ideas of memory and myth.

Created in collaboration with site responsive artists Lay of the Land and videographer and director Laura Sheeran, TERRARIUM will be presented in a multi-layered configuration, bringing its audience on an immersive experience of the changing geological terrain at Boora, with the musicians of Crash Ensemble evoking the complex role that water has played, and continues to play, in the history of the Midlands. This dynamic setting will situate the audience in a landscape of time where they can hear, see, and feel the strata of this earth transforming.

Supported by Culture Ireland

Co-commissioned by Crash Ensemble, November Music and hcmf

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