Mark Garry, Mick O'Hara & Carol Anne McGowan - Notes Gifted to Time album launch

Join Mark Garry and Carol Anne McGowan at this special launch event at The Yeats Building, Sligo for the new LP, Notes Gifted to Time. Tickets are free but due to limited capacity, booking is essential.

Notes Gifted to Time is the new album from critically acclaimed contemporary artist and musician Mark Garry. The project brings together Garry's ambient and electronic compositions with the haunting vocals of Carol Anne McGowan, built upon a text by the philosopher Mick O'Hara.

The Story Behind the Album

Notes Gifted to Time is a response to a text titled The Crystal Image and the Memory of Mourning — a philosophical work gifted to Garry by Mick O'Hara. When this text was written Mick and Mark had both recently lost a parent and this text was Mick’s reflection on how the finality of death and grief are intertwined with intimacy, time and the stories of our lives and the particular relationship between time, grief and mourning. Garry adapted the text into song forms and composed a series of ambient electronic landscapes designed for McGowan's vocal interpretations to exist within.

"Sound and music has been a long-established characteristic of my research, writing, and making practices. I am deeply interested in sound and listening as forms of meaning making, music’s participatory scope and its enabling of particular forms of empathetic connection. Music like love, friendship or kinship are invisible and ephemeral but profoundly felt. Music reverberates within us and beyond us, existing in both our inner and outer worlds, functional and subjective, enabling compassionate alliances that are simultaneously utilitarian and profound.”

About the Artists

Mark Garry is a visual artist and musician whose practice has consistently woven sound into his research and making. He has integrated sonic compositions and sonic sculptures in his installation practice, made permanent outdoor sonic sculptures. Mark hosted listening clubs with Sean Carpio in a number of his studios for many years in Dublin and subsequently at art institutions around the country . Mark has written about music, sound and sonic activity in many contexts; most recently in his past two publications; to hold and to be held and Songs and the Soil. He has performed live in various collectives at The Kerlin Gallery Dublin, The Model, Sligo, The Douglas Hyde gallery, Dublin, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, the Serpentine Gallery, London, Cave, Detroit, Michigan and White Box, in New York.

Mark has released music by artists such as Karl Him, Chequerboard, Secret society, Sanso Xtro and The Warlords of Pez  as part of his curatorial activity and has released a number of Albums with a collective made up of Karl Burke, Sean and  Eileen Carpio, Nina Hynes and Fabien Leseure. He has persistently collaborated with the Composer and multi-instrumentalist Sean Carpio collaborating on soundtracks for Mark’s film works and Drift; a performative and recording project that took place in The Goat Yard, Detroit and Horseshoe Bay on Sherkin Island.  

Mick O’Hara is an artist and lecturer in Fine Art and Visual Culture at Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin). As an artist he has exhibited both nationally and internationally and his recent artwork focuses on the inherent materiality of objects and their relationship to language. He has written responsive texts for artists publications. He has published work on subjects such as the philosophy of technology, the aesthetics of the post-digital, and the aesthetics of football. Mick is Part of The Aesthetics Group a group of performative pedagogy researchers and practitioners from a variety of different backgrounds such as philosophy, visual art, digital media, theatre and performance.

Carol Anne McGowan is an Irish singer-songwriter and visual artist hailing from the windswept landscapes of Donegal. Her music weaves haunting melodies with poetic lyricism, creating an intimate world of emotion and atmosphere. Often compared to Lisa Hannigan and Vashti Bunyan, McGowan crafts songs that are spare yet rich with feeling — echoes of traditional Irish folk blending seamlessly with modern minimalist arrangements.

Her 2023 album Aer was born during the pandemic lockdowns — a series of vocal experiments using only her layered and treated voice, creating compositions that evoke church organs and keyboards. More recently, she has begun breathing new life into poems from the past, setting words to music that feel both ancient and contemporary.