Messengers of Yesterday is a collection of photographic collages exploring the legacy of Ireland’s 1846-1851 famine, also known as An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger) and the perpetual migration narrative that has shaped Ireland’s identity since that great trauma. The project seeks to validate the cultural memory of a community, explores the lineage of colonization, and examines a legacy of dislocation.
Messengers of Yesterday is a collection of photographic collages exploring the legacy of Ireland’s 1846-1851 famine, also known as An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger) and the perpetual migration narrative that has shaped Ireland’s identity since that great trauma. The project seeks to validate the cultural memory of a community, explores the lineage of colonization, and examines a legacy of dislocation.
Photographs of my ancestors, evictions, engravings from the Illustrated London News and quotes taken from the“1937 Schools’ Folklore Scheme,†commissioned by the Irish Folklore commission have been transferred to transparencies and re-photographed in the contemporary Irish landscape. Some images are also made into a combination portrait, or layered with imagery from historical famine sites and quotes from the Schools’ Folklore Scheme. The quotes give privilege to folk memory and those who attempt to remember this great trauma in Irish history and the illustrations from the Illustrated London News (published between 1845-52) demonstrate the significant changes to the land since then. Simultaneously, the photographic transparency layered over the contemporary landscape becomes a metaphorical device, exploring dislocation and absence.
This work began as a journey into my family archive as well as a journey to Ireland and is an attempt to understand my Irish American identity in the midst of the famine. As a child, my own family’s narrative was one of dislocation, due to lost homes, expulsion from rental properties and disrupted family dynamics. This prompted a nostalgic longing for a vague Irish heritage. This early life experience dovetailed with stories of my ancestors being forced to leave Ireland, and so my empathy for that kind of dislocation and loss of place continually draws me there.
While it is an unrealistic scenario, by taking images of my ancestors back to their native country, I symbolically complete the circle of their migration pattern. This work explores the gap between what is and what could have been; it is a search for a universal home. Ultimately, I am attempting to convey loss while also exploring the redemptive and beautiful qualities of the Irish landscape and it’s community, within an autobiographical and historical structure. One cannot possibly know - but I am trying to understand - how the death and migration of millions from Ireland can be translated artistically.
This project begs the question, “What would Ireland be like today without its great history of perpetual migration?†Famine historian/author Ciarán Ó Murchadha argues, "Famine broke the legendary attachment of Irish people to home, hearth and parish, and helped institute a long and grossly dysfunctional tradition of solving social problems, tractable or intractable by emigration."