During the second week of my summer study away adventure in Dublin, Ireland, I trekked over to the LAB gallery to meet up with my classmates and professor and learn more about the arts in Dublin. I was feeling extremely confident in my navigation abilities, as I had found my way to the LAB solo without once taking a wrong turn in the labyrinthine streets of this nonsensical city. After our whole class had gathered, we stepped into one of the galleries of the LAB. This gallery contained several different art installations, had huge windows with a view of James Joyce Street, and had some kind of bizarre whale sound effects playing loudly in the background. Of all these sights and sounds that immediately overwhelmed my senses, I was struck by one particular piece: a line drawing of a wave, with thinner lines drawn parallel to the line of the initial waveform many times, curving and distorting to create a strange, almost three-dimensional effect that played tricks on my eyes. Although the drawing was very simplistic and looked like something I’d doodled in my physics notes in high school, there was something about the boldness of it and the stark contrast of the black lines on white wood that really caught my eye.

As a student studying media production and hoping to find a career on the technical side of the music industry, I really liked the use of a sound wave as the basis for this piece. I study and work with sound waves quite frequently, and I’ve always found them fascinating. I wondered about the intended meaning behind this drawing and I was curious to find out more about the artist and the inspiration for this piece.

I looked at the info card and found that this piece was called “The Fine Line,” drawn by Cian O’Sullivan with Maeve O’Neill. This piece was part of O’Sullivan’s work to explore the senses and attitudes towards disability. “The Fine Line” was intended as a visual representation of what it’s like to be deaf. I found this very interesting, as I have many deaf family members and I have always wished I could understand their world better. I looked at the drawing again with this new information, hoping some epiphany would strike me and I would suddenly understand what it was really like to live in a world without sound. However, after several more minutes of contemplation, I really had no idea how this cluster of parallel lines was supposed to represent what it’s like to be deaf. The lines looked cool, but still didn’t mean anything to me.

So maybe I didn’t completely “get” this piece. I don’t have to understand it exactly as the artist intended it in order for me to appreciate it to some degree. That’s what I love about art; art has the ability to cross cultural barriers, like different levels of ability or different nationalities, and bring people together in common pursuit of something awesome.

View photos of the piece here:  Fine Line