the disappeared

2013

the disappeared grew from my involvement as a cultural geographer in 2011 with a Firestation Artists’ Studios Thinktank programme, convened with Danish curatorial platform Kuratorisk Action, called Troubling Ireland.

I began with the intention of troubling the terms ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ as applied to the island of Ireland, and ended by troubling myself, realising that my responses to these terms were as much emotional as intellectual.

Invited to show artwork with the other artists involved in the project in Upending, at the Limerick City Gallery of Art, I developed this collection of drawings and photographs around the theme of colonialism. Later it was shown in Sea-change, a group show at Queen’s University Marine Laboratory in Portaferry, County Down.

In the disappeared I reflect on what it means to be descended from colonisers, who settles where, and why, the circulation of people and things, absence and presence and traces and erasures. I made a set of drawings of academic texts, family records and poetry, and a series of pinhole photographs. I focused on Strangford Lough as a repeatedly colonised land- and water-scape, a site of multiple arrivals and departures.