Ireland In My DNA

The power of the Burren National Park, strange ancient place of natural beauty, mystery and history on the northwest of County Clare, Ireland first caught me in 2015 and pulled me into Ireland.  I rented a car and drove straight across Ireland.  It was a thickly grey  foggy day, and all I could see was the dotted white line on the M6 that heads west straight across Ireland from Dublin.  I emerged out of the fog and found myself on the coast of the Burren facing the Atlantic Ocean.  The greyness of the fog continued eerily in the landscape of grey limestone karst and grey silvery still ocean.  Most eerie of all was the silence.  How could it be silent when I was standing on the edge of the Atlantic? Never found out.

I was chasing a dream.  A recurring dream I'd had fortnightly, in 1977, for six months before leaving Australia forever … I thought at the time.  The place, my home in that dream, is in the heart of Ireland, and I finally found it, just outside of Nenagh, Tipperary in central Ireland. I'd spent two weeks in a very reasonably priced and cosy large country house, managed by the 93 year old owner Sean Mounsey … but that's another story!  I mention it here because it represents an important development in my practice, and the beginning of my research into the ancestral memories held in our DNA.

I was invited to a five week artist residency, starting mid-September 2017, at The Burren College of Art which is a remarkable private venture.  In 1997 Michael Green and his wife Mary Hawkes opened the College, a small but significant international arts education centre, and asset to the local community. They have about 30 students and 10 staff.  Environmental sustainability, awareness and respect are key founding principles and form the bedrock on which the College is built. In fact they only accept students and artists who's work is connected to those themes. Michael and Mary had spent years working with the local community to establish the Burren as a National Park, and finding ways to benefit the local community economically.

Becoming Familiar

Even on the bus from the airport I noticed remarkably rich plant diversity in roadside nature strips, contributing to the green that Ireland is so famous for.  I learned that the Irish government has a system of measuring diversity on farms and an award system to recognise rich bio-diversity.  

I sense that the land is happy.  It is giving back for the care and loving attention it receives from humans.  The weather is conducive to prolific growth, and the amount of water in the air, under the ground and coming out of the sky ensures that even the thought of growth in a tiny seed is nurtured to fullness.  There is a softness in the air alongside the wild weather coming off the Atlantic Ocean.

Walking on the green and grey Burren, intriguing and intimate micro worlds pull me into the undulating layers of grey limestone karst. Even a crack between rocks is home to multiple species, a whole green micro world. The karst, or paps to the locals, is pale when dry, and becomes dramatically dark within a few minutes when it rains.  It's honeycombed with cracks and crevasses, underground river systems and many caves. And all the rain fills up the porous earth beneath the surface, evaporates, creates more rain and on it goes.  Very fertile land.  

A Surprisingly Simple Ancestral Memory

One of the joys I am taking is eating the delicious ripe blackberries that grow everywhere.  Because they are part of a plant ecology where each has its own important reason for being, they are not out of control and sprayed like they are in Australia, so I have been feasting!  And observing the almost ridiculous delight I take with each mouth popping berry.  

It takes me back to my childhood and family blackberrying days and Mum's blackberry jam.  Then it occurs to me that my Irish ancestors would have picked ripe blackberries as they walked in exactly the same way as I am.  And with that thought I have a whooshing sensation and an even stronger sense of connection to this beautiful jewel of an island.

Some of my ancestors walked this land, and it has these deep echoes of genetic memory as I’ve been researching my question:  Do we hold all the memories of our ancestors in our DNA?

I had experienced the triggering of ancestral memory.  Which is exactly why I came!  I had been looking for it.  But what a strange whispering thing to look for.  How do I look for it?  How do I know when I have found it?  The whole process is very intuitive and non-intellectual.  It's in the way my body, the whole of my being, responds to the energy of the land. In this case a tiny juicy gift from the land.

Artists Residency - Supervisor and Studio

This is my first artists residency, so in some ways it has been an introduction to the idea of spending extended time immersed in a new place and in a studio, fully focussed on my arts practice. There are five days left as I write now and I am reflecting on what I have learned.  The people I have rubbed up against are as important as anything else.  In my normal life I spend 80% of my time alone.  Here there is someone in the room or studio 80% of the time.   All of them here for very similar reasons to mine, with their own knowledge and experience and arts practice.  These conversations and interactions have been enormously influential and may even prove to be the greatest learning.

A five week residency seems like such a short time, but this visit has given me a deepening connection with place, creating an obsession to capture something of the light, the mystery, and raw nature of a place that sits on the western edge of Europe where the Atlantic ocean pounds constantly against dramatic cliffs and rocky islands.

Conceptually my work is informed by two main themes.  The first and longterm overarching theme is our human relationship with the planet, and the second is that we hold the memories of all our ancestors in our DNA.  So I have been observing and absorbing the Burren through these two prisms.  

Ruby Wallis, who has been my supervisor, helping me make the most of my residency, tells me that my approach to research is phenomenology!    It has felt so deeply personal, and part of my life since before art history, criticism or theory, before even Waisted Talent, and certainly before parenting.  I haven't talked about it at the VCA for fear of being thought an old hippy.  So how absurdly reaffirming it is to find that it's a completely valid and respected thing.  I suspect Ruby's observation has begun a focussed path of reading and absorption. 

How is my method phenomenological? Well … looking back now, I can see it began while I was living in London, England from 1978 to 1982 and found myself thinking I’d been there before. Everything was easy, and I slipped into a lifestyle, great job and warm friendships without effort it seemed. I travelled a lot around England, staying with the very generous families of friends, and finding that same pull of connection almost everywhere I went. I felt that I was a greater version of myself. And there was the recurring dream I mentioned at the beginning, and the earlier trip to Ireland to locate the home from that dream.

By going to the lands I think my ancestors have inhabited, and feeling the energy of the place, I can identify that my forebears had lived there. It’s not an intellectual process. It comes from somewhere I now think of as cellular, in my DNA. For a long time I thought I had strong past life memories, now I attribute those memories to what is held in my DNA. Its a very subjective approach, yet as we know, everything subjective and personal is universal.

Turns out this “feeling the energy of the land” is phenomenological, and so began my inquiry into what exactly that means, the reading of philosophers who have written about the subject, and the opening of a whole new world of thinking, perceiving and art making. This alone reinforces for me the imperative of the extended time for contemplated thought offered by artists residencies.

Having a studio!  What bliss.  No matter how hard I try to rationalise the ease of working at home the fact that my work is in a different place from where I live means that when I'm in the studio I am focussed totally on my work.  I don't take my computer, so I am simply in art making mode there.  It is totally my happy place, and I need to listen to that.  

It takes about fifteen minutes to walk from my accommodation to my studio, along a narrow hedged road.  Quite scary when a car passes. There is enough time to breathe the invigorating air, observe the weather and clouds, to reconnect with exactly this part of Ireland and the day I'm about to start in my studio.

The Work Of The Residency:  Conceptual Videos and Photos, and Pen+Ink Drawings

Hmmm … I think I'll let the work speak for itself!