Installation by Artist in Residence Ellie Ga

Artist Ellie Ga returns to campus as part of her multi-year artist residency in Special Collections. Her artwork will be temporarily displayed in the Campus Center beginning at noon on March 25 until March 28, 5pm.

Cagarros Assembly: A Jangada
multichannel sound installation, 9:27.

• Cagarros, or Cory’s shearwater (Calonectris borealis), are an elusive species of nocturnal migratory seabird that nests in underground burrows on small islands of the North Atlantic Ocean. Approximately 75% of the global population breeds in the Azores. When the fledglings leave the nest for the first time the artificial lights disorientate the fledglings, so they often become lost, smash into lights or are killed on island roads. 
• During an artist residency in the Azores, Ga was inspired by the raucous sound of these birds returning to their breeding grounds at night. She has embedded with SOS Cagarros, an organization that works with the local population to encourage the rescue of young Cory’s shearwaters.
• Resulting from a series of listening sessions with marine biologists and individuals from the blind community, Ellie Ga’s ongoing research and sound installation A Jangada continues as part of her residency in Special Collections at Bryn Mawr College.
• Sign up to participate in artist interviews about light and disorientation.

Ellie Ga (b. 1976) is an American artist living in Portugal, whose practice sits between memoir, travelogue, and visual essay connecting ideas and presenting them as multichannel videos or performances with live narration. Gyres 1-3 (2019) looks at water as the site of political exile, religious pilgrimage, and forced migration across the Aegean Sea. Her working process is a kind of “beach-combing” that embraces chance encounter with artifacts and how they find their way to her. It involves extended periods of research, including conversations with people in roles, such as museum directors, scholars, Arctic explorers. Her interests are interdisciplinary and cross-temporal. She speaks of her work as a collection of chance encounters, what is lost (and accrued) in translating between spoken and written words, and archaeological discovery.

Ga's residency at Bryn Mawr College allows her to "comb" special collections, conduct archival research, and engage in conversations, all in the process of producing a new project, commissioned by the College.

See more about Ellie Ga here