Research Note 14: In the Loop

Returning

Maybe it’s all the travelling to and from Ireland that I have been doing recently, but I keep thinking about repetition.

About what happens when a single movement is repeated, looped, and returned to.

Film makes this possible. A movement that might take only a few seconds can be held there. I can watch it again. And again. I can even reverse it and start again.

Or like a vinyl record when it gets stuck in a groove and the sound glitches, repeating the same tiny section over and over.

I seem to return to this in my work — a gesture, a movement, a fragment of film, something glimpsed and then looked at again.

Perhaps what interests me is that although the movement, sound, or whatever is under the microscope stays the same, my experience of it changes. By the second or third time, I’m already looking at it — or listening to it — differently.

I don’t think I am trying to arrive at an answer. Perhaps I am more interested in, as the Americans might say, “circling” something, returning to it, seeing what might reveal itself through the repetition.

Or maybe I’m simply mesmerised by it, and it pulls me in to look over and over and over again.

Maybe this is one of the reasons I keep making films.

Looped sequence from material shot for forthcoming 16mm film Frames of Reference, which will be released in 2027.

Current exhibitions

Work by Mairéad McClean is currently included in Technologies of Peace at IMMA, Dublin, and Picturing the Border: 1921–2026 at Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, Ireland.

No More (2013) is showing at IMMA, and A Line Was Drawn (2019) is showing at Highlanes Gallery.