The Memory Room book and 3” CD extends the experience of the installation itself, a further creative layer that can be taken away and absorbed by the viewer/listener at their own pace and in their own personal circumstances. Colour and black & white photographs, drawings, and layers of text printed onto papers of varying opacity, read in combination with a sound composition contained on the CD, bring McCarthy’s ideas into the realm of the tangible.

The Memory Room is a project by the Cork-based multimedia artist Danny McCarthy, whose pioneering art practice explores a combination of visual and auditory experiences. This new work consists of an ongoing series of installations in conjunction with a new book and CD published by the Irish sound-art label Farpoint Recordings.

Through the use of personal materials gathered from his past and by using other related ephemera, the artist seeks to reach back in time on a 'psycho-sonic' journey, re-establishing old connections and reviving random fragments of lost memories and locating them in the now. This is achieved through the use of sounds, text and found objects that are installed in specially chosen locations throughout the space.

While these explorations may often connect specifically with aspects of McCarthy’s youth and early adulthood in his home-town of Mallow, Co. Cork (his father’s life as a blacksmith/farrier, nights spent playing rock-and-roll in the local dance-hall, early forays into improvisation), there are also meditations of a less specific and more abstracted nature. These are fleeting and often loosely threaded together, but always accessible, thus encouraging people to explore their own inner soundscape.

From 25 to 29 June 2012, the exhibition room in Shandon's The Guesthouse will play host to a further exploration of the themes from this project. Residing ‘memories of place’ and past histories caged within the old structures of The Guesthouse building will mesh and play alongside the gentle reverberations of this latest instalment of The Memory Room. The installation, curated by Anthony Kelly, will be subject to daily change.

The Memory Room project (which had its first airing at Hilltown New Music Festival in 2010) is scheduled to travel to Sound Fjord (London) and The Room (Turin, Italy) during 2013.