Clare Langan's visually stunning films of post-apocalyptic landscapes could be interpreted as prophecies of ecological disaster, but if so, she doesn't seem too upset at the prospect, writes AIDAN DUNNE

IT IS, AS philosopher Martin Heidegger famously put it, always already too late. Our attempts to step outside the stark imperatives of our mortal existence and gain some transcendent, objective viewpoint, he argued, are already doomed to failure by the very nature of our being.

In Clare Langan’s world, equally, it is always already too late. Throughout the course of a formidable sequence of short, visually stunning films, the three most recent of which – The Ice Above, The Fire Below, Metamorphosis, and The Flooded Rooms – are currently on view at Limerick City Gallery of Art, she evokes a post-apocalyptic world in which we are expressly denied the comfort of a reliable viewpoint and in which any possibility of a human future is cruelly, indifferently stymied.

Normally when we look at a film we expect certain things, the reassuring conventions of image and story that allow us to retain a residual control, no matter what shocks are meted out to us along the way. But right from the beginning of her professional practice, it is as if Langan has chosen to start at precisely the moment when this contract between artist and audience has broken down. Despite the considerable visual elegance of everything she does, there is something brutal and absolute about the way the world she describes is defined in terms of a post-human future.

Not that the human presence is negated in her films. On the contrary, human figures, usually anonymous and viewed in long shot, are explicitly or implicitly there in most of her work. But they are marginal, dwarfed by the scale of vast, inimical environments, denied immediate respite and, more importantly, the prospect of any viable future. They have trekked and struggled to find that their destination is ruined and blighted, that there is nowhere left to go.

In addition, traces of human activity are much in evidence. We quickly get the sense that we are looking at the residue of a human world, a civilisation that has succumbed to disaster. In different films we see the variously degraded remains of habitation, industry and culture.

Ash or snow fall in the open stairwell of a grand house in Metamorphosis. Domestic spaces are awash with water in The Flooded Rooms, an image which, like the falling snow or ash in Metamorphosis, recalls one of Andrei Tarkovsky’s stylistic tropes. In Langan’s Too Dark for Night, meanwhile, a traveller negotiates a desolate landscape and arrives at a town to find it abandoned and half-engulfed by advancing desert sands. Forty Below depicts a frozen world as a bleak realm, utterly without refuge, while Glass Hour centres on a molten, volcanic landscape that is apparently overwhelming a vast industrial installation.

For The Ice Above, The Fire Below, Langan employed a high-speed digital Phantom camera, which produces images in extreme slow motion. Footage of waves breaking forcefully against a slab of rocky shoreline is projected on to three adjoining screens simultaneously, but the images are variously and continuously rotated, and time is sometimes reversed. What is showing on one screen will be upside-down, another on its side, one running forwards, another backwards, all in a strange, hypnotic choreography.

This might be distracting if we were looking at a conventionally picturesque landscape, but we are faced with a virtually abstract, tightly framed expanse in which the world is reduced to the endless play of elemental forces.

FOR LANGAN, as well, the appeal of the ultra-slow motion is that it further abstracts the material.

“It’s not just that it slows down our normal way of seeing,” she says. “What I like about it is that we never normally see things in that way at all. Because it breaks time down into impossibly small intervals, we don’t really recognise the appearance of what we’re looking at – it changes it.”

The results are, she feels, very like painting in some ways. The term sculptural is also relevant to the way she sites the moving images in relation to the architecture of the space.

“I’ve become really interested in the way you can experience film in a space and as a space, and I’ve started to give more consideration to the kind of architectural space in which the work will be seen,” she says.

Previously, particularly in her early works, she used hand-made filters with coloured gels to distort the images and generate effects that were distinctly painterly. Now she is more inclined to try to achieve what she wants without such interventions, though she has built sets and filmed them, as in some of Metamorphosis and all of The Flooded Rooms.

One advantage is that the models make the images more ambiguous.

As with the other two films showing in Limerick, the score for The Ice Above, The Fire Below is by Jürgen Simpson, with whom she has worked several times before. But for The Ice Above, rather than going through in detail what she had in mind, “I just left him to it, I let him take the music in whatever direction he wanted to. There’s a lot of natural sound in it, a lot of the sea.”

Right from the beginning, technical professionalism has been important to her. She graduated from the National College of Art and Design in Dún Laoghaire in 1989 and went on to study at New York University’s Intensive Film Workshop in 1992 on a Fulbright Scholarship. She notes, wryly, that she’s been drawn to working in a ferociously expensive medium, and funding her projects is always difficult.

THE ROMANTIC SUBLIME, and particularly the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich, are clearly references or points of departure for any consideration of her work. But she is not a latter-day Romantic. For one thing, she seems to rule out the consolatory appeal to divine omniscience, and omnipotence, that was central to Friedrich’s vision.

Is she, then, a prophet of ecological catastrophe? It is certainly possible to view her films as cautionary tales of environmental disaster, a subject she was addressing well before it became as mainstream as it is now. Yet she’s not preaching an ecological message. She’s considering an aftermath, but you feel she’s not too upset at the prospect, and that pointing out to people the error of their ways is in no way a priority for her.

Her work strongly suggests that she likes and is drawn to the extreme, inhospitable environments, from glaciers to deserts, that feature prominently in it. She readily concurs with this idea. She’s been back to Iceland several times, for example. Because of its singular geological character, occupying as it does a shifting volcanic hotspot on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Iceland has a stark, dramatic, other-worldly quality. The country, with its underlying molten layer and its chilly surface, clearly inspired The Ice Above, The Fire Below, but, as it happens, the footage was shot on the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland, a place Langan knows well and identifies with.

While she likes shooting in Ireland, and intends to do more here, Iceland is clearly special.

“I love working in – and with – the rawness of the Icelandic landscape,” she says. “In a way, it’s my ideal environment, because you feel it could equally be the beginning of time or the end of time there. It’s so extreme it’s just not like anywhere else.”

Clare Langan:

The Ice Above, The Fire Below and Other Works 2007-2009

is at Limerick City Gallery of Art, Carnegie Building, Pery Square, Limerick, until Mar 1 (Mon-Fri 10am-6pm, Thurs 10am-7pm, Sat 1pm-5pm, Sun 2pm-5pm)