In 2021-2022 Artlink commissioned Garrett Carr to curate an exhibition the subject of the British/Irish border, to be staged at the Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny.
Participants from the 2019 Drawn From Borders project were invited to submit a proposal to develop their work. Four artists were selected: Sue Morris, Anna Marie Savage, Noel Connor and Janet Hoy received an artist fee and received regular guidance and mentoring from the curator. As part of the programme the artists took part in a panel discussion at the RCC which was well attended by members of the public.
Anna Marie Savage: Semtex and Powdered Milk!
Anna Marie Savage’s work explored the partitioning of Ireland and the impact and legacy of the events that occurred during this period on communities living along the border and further afield; while also exploring the strategic placing of watchtowers the south Armagh border. Another strand of her research considered the three historical surveys of the borderland by Dougherty, Bailey and Robinson and how the boundary for an Ulster exclusion zone was drawn up.
Noel Connor: Lost Lines!
“As Patrick Kavanagh said, ‘We have lived in important places’. In his poem ‘The Ministry of Fear’ Seamus Heaney reinforced Patrick Kavanagh’s declaration with his own recall of localised events and memories. It has surprised me in developing my work for Frontier Work that I now find myself recognizing such potency in re-entering the small invisibly bordered territory which I inhabited as a child and teenager”.
Janet Hoy: Turf Wall!
Across the summer Janet Hoy traveled the border from Warrenpoint to Lough Foyle, taking photographs of what she could see where roads cross the border. At points she was confronted by a vivid reality of a border but there were also points where there is nothing but open countryside. She transferred these images, using photo decals, onto Bord na Mona peat briquettes, ‘bricks’ – made from Irish land – to build her gathered perceptions of the border into a physical wall.
Sue Morris and Greg McLaughlin: Bingo Borderland!
Bingo Borderland is a collaboration between Sue Morris and Greg McLaughlin, a media sociologist. They are married and have lived in Derry for six years. Sue is from London and has become increasingly interested in what she sees as ‘other’ places/spaces on the border and its hinterland. The proliferation of road-side vendors, used-car lots, currency
exchanges, amusement arcades, filling stations etc., constitute a cross-border economy and reflect the precarious nature of life on the border. Garrett Carr is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s, and author of The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland’s Border and curator of Mapping Alternative Ulster.
- March 04, 2022
