Tyndall’s Blues (at VISUAL Carlow from 23 July to 18 October 2020) is an artistic collaboration between visual artist Mark Joyce and composer Fergal Dowling which responds to the transparent skin of Visual Carlow, designed by Terry Pawson as, ‘an intersecting assembly of translucent glass volumes that transforms throughout the day as light passes through the building skin.’

Tyndall’s Blues uses blue light and intermittent ‘refracted' sound to explore the work of Carlow born John Tyndall (1820-93) the brilliant nineteenth-century experimental physicist, alpinist, progressive public intellectual and gifted science educator. One of the founders of climate science, he is remembered most famously for explaining why the sky is blue.

Mark Joyce explores the anomalies and phenomenological strangeness of our optical experience, with ideas drawn from scientific and philosophical concepts of physical light. He studied Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, has had solo exhibitions in Ireland, UK, and the USA, won awards from The British Council, Thomas Damman Trust, and the Georgette Chen fellowship in 2016. His work is in the collections of the IMMA and the Arts Council of Ireland. He has been the Artist in Residence at the Josef and Annie Albers Foundation, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore, and the Icelandic Centre for the Arts. He was the inaugural Director of Arts at Yale-National University of Singapore and Visiting Professor at the Kyoto City University of the Arts and Erasmus Visiting Fellow at the University of the Arts, Helsinki in 2019.

Fergal Dowling is a composer of mixed acoustic and electronic music works which often employ computer-based interaction, real-time composition in combination with sound spatialisation. His works have been performed at festivals, including: Sonorities, ISSTA, Música Viva, Japan Electroacoustic Festival, ISCM World Music Days, and Future Sonic. He studied composition at Trinity College Dublin and York and has received the Elizabeth Maconchy Composition Fellowship, and Arts Council Bursaries and Commissions. He co-founded Dublin Sound Lab, a new music project group through which he has commissioned and produced many collaborative projects with musicians and artists. He founded and directs the Music Current annual contemporary music festival in Dublin.