Cian Handschuh is an Irish visual artist often using sculptural installations to explore questions of dwelling, ownership, land dysphoria, and heritage. The work examines links between body and land, approaching the dwelling as a mutual space and, as such, an analysis point for their interaction. Drawing from the environment through the lens of an “extended body,” formal construction materials are frequently contrasted and combined with those of the natural world.

The work seeks to shorten the proximity between ourselves and our dwelling, establishing a sense of nearness to material and land, often drawing on mythological and folkloric narratives to further situate the practice within an Irish context, animating land and making energies visible. The things attempt to embody a seeking and a longing for an open transference, a softening of the boundary between self and land, as a means of questioning.

Materials are often gleaned, foraged, and recovered; their remnants borrowed, their histories, speculative or otherwise, carried into his work.

During his residency at GlogauAIR, the work flows specifically toward the sonic and musical infrastructure of sacred spaces, examining dissonance and its potentially luring nature. Here, industrially manufactured things themselves are positioned as sacred architecture, shifting in status to be approached as sites of animate presences rather than as discarded capitalist bi-products.