Irvine & Spence

  • Disproportionate Impacts & Everyday Agitations This collaborative work from Irvine & Spence was the winner of the RSA Lens-Based Media...

    Disproportionate Impacts & Everyday Agitations 

     

    This collaborative work from Irvine & Spence was the winner of the RSA Lens-Based Media Award 2024. This was an interim award between the Morton Award and the Elizabeth Lornie Awards. The Lornie Photography Award was launched in 2025 and the Lornie film award will be launched this year. 

     

    Disproportionate Impacts & Everyday Agitations is a new body of work extending Irvine & Spence’s ongoing enquiry into precarity. It explores the pervasive logic of borrowing against the future — economically, environmentally and socially — and the deferred consequences that continue to shape contemporary life. Rather than presenting collapse as a single event, the work traces cycles of pressure, impact and reset, where damage is repeatedly staged but never fully resolved. 

     

    This refusal of conclusion is central. The release promised by teetering, falling and smashing never quite arrives; each impact folds back into anticipation and returns to the conditions that produced it. Although shaped by precarity and collapse, the work is not pessimistic. Moments of play, absurdity and sensory pleasure appear throughout, with humour and colour coexisting alongside exhaustion. These are not forms of escape, but coping mechanisms: ways of continuing within systems that do not resolve. As Toi Dericotte writes, “joy is an act of resistance”. 

     

    Zoë Irvine and Pernille Spence began collaborating as Irvine & Spence in 2015, bringing together sound, performance and video. Their practice is rooted in experimentation, close observation and audio-visual composition, often exploring the relationship between looking and listening. Their works have been screened internationally; Bob & Sink was selected for the Aesthetica Art Prize in 2020, and Getting Okay With Not Being Ok, That Things Are Not Okay won the Prix DeVarti Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2024. 

     

    Pernille Spence                    

    b. 1970

    Pernille Spence is an artist who has created performance work in the sky with a team of skydivers, been lifted into the air by 22 giant weather balloons and devised a series of performances in over 50 locations in the landscape alongside railway lines from Aberdeen to Glasgow.  Her work has been shown in many galleries and festivals worldwide including the National Review of Live Art, Glasgow, the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, Germany and was part of >>FFWD: Artists’ Moving Image from Scotland in Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, China. Pernille is Head of Art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design. 

     

    Zoe Irvine                    

    b. 1972

    Zoe Irvine is an artist and filmmaker, exploring voice, field recordings and the relationship between sound and image. Her artworks range from carefully crafted individual pieces for broadcast and installation, to participative events. Recent works includes Closed Caption Silence created collaboratively with Photinus Studio, David Dale Gallery Glasgow (2025) and 900 Voices, created with Lindsay Perth and Jules Rawlinson in St Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh International Festival 2024. Zoë also works as a freelance sound designer and is Lecturer in Sound for Film on MA and BA film courses at Edinburgh Napier / Screen Academy Scotland.