These Artists Used The Ocean Around Inis Oírr as Their Canvas
‘The Ninth Wave’ is a site specific light installation using one laser with a custom mapping patch by Bertie Sampson and Kev Freeney Curated by Mary Nally for Drop Everything 2026
An Trá, Inis Oírr, Aran Islands.
Kevin Freeney has been travelling to Inis Oírr since 2014. Drop Everything, an intimate artist weekender which takes place every two years on the island, keeps inviting a certain kind of work back. The island is remote, harsh, and the Atlantic is close enough to set the terms and when the conditions align. The work that lands there lands in unison with the place. He invited Bertie Sampson over with no fixed brief: come, be present, work with what the environment gives. What they created was a line.
The piece holds a single solid line of light across the tideline. A linear line is an unnatural shape, nothing in this landscape draws straight and that is the move. The wall is set against the sea so the ocean has something to break into. The spray and the surf and the foam crash against it and reveal themselves as organic form. The line is the foil. The Atlantic is the subject.
The work tracks the tidal cycle, shifting every 6 hours and 12 minutes, so the waves keep meeting it as the water rises and falls through the night. The piece invites you to walk around it, to look from different angles, to take it in more than once — there is play in it, and it changes with where you stand.
This draws on a strand of Celtic mythology. “Waves were said to arrive in series of nine, and the ninth was a magical threshold: the boundary between Ireland and the Otherworld, between this life and Tír na nÓg. To pass beyond it was either exile or sacred passage. The installation makes that threshold visible, a barrier of light the ocean cannot cross but never stops reaching toward”, says Kevin.
“The locals named it *an Solas Mór*, the Big Light. They also told us that at certain times of year, plankton washes onto these shores and the water lights itself up — a bioluminescent moment that arrives every now and again, beautiful, brief, and gone. They recognised the piece in that.”
It is a work about rhythm and frequency. About introspection and a pause. About taking a beat with new friends and old, and being reminded that the natural world is already extraordinary, the work is just the line that lets you see it.
