'The Borderlands'
After independence in 1922 and in particular, during the ‘Troubles’ the border was visible and instrumental in defining identities.
Since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 travelling along and across this border there have been no physical expressions, no watchtowers, fences or walls, it is unseeable, it is a virtual psychological construct.
However, in the run-up to and after Brexit it has become discernable again and starts to evoke renewed questions about identity.
An overgrown Iron Age linear earthwork acts as a conceptual starting point for the inquiry.
This intriguing location, known locally as ‘The Black Pig’s Dyke’, is a 2000-year-old boundary that runs parallel to the present-day Irish / UK border, after Brexit, it now shadows another border that of the European Union and the UK.
Two questions emerge; “Can the post-independence border be interpreted, to some degree, as a cross-Channel extension of the Scottish/English border thus emphasising a cultural divide?" and "Can a deep sense of history and place help inoculate against what Freud called the narcissism of small differences ?"
The Dissenting tradition, Swann’s cultural identity, comes under scrutiny.
The ancient dark physicality of the Black Pigs Dyke alongside the architectural clarity of the disused Cahans Presbyterian Meeting House in the border county of Monaghan establishes a tension.
Built in 1840 on the site of an earlier 17th-century Meeting House it was from here in 1764 the Rev. Thomas Clark led 300 of his congregation on the “Cahans Exodus” to pre-revolutionary America in the search of religious and civil freedom.
The issue of Freud’s theory on 'the narcissism of small differences’ resonates throughout the project throwing light on the binary cultures of forgetting and remembrance so prevalent in Irish culture.
Below is a selection of the work in progress.
