“Jack Wyse saw fairies dancing on the Allenwood road at 11pm one night”
Written by an Allenwood Schoolchild, 1938
We are mistakenly led to believe that a story has a beginning, middle and end. But not all tales can be recounted in this way. Instead, they can be layered, incomplete and infinite, existing and surrounding us at all moments of our lives.
In 1930s Ireland, the National Folklore Collection was established to preserve local stories in a fledging nation which was trying to forge its identity as a relatively-recent independent state. Housed in University College Dublin, today, it is one of the largest collections of oral and ethnological material in the world. During this period, stories were collected from schoolchildren countrywide. Many of these tales are now forgotten in the local consciousness but the archives tell tales of rebellion, local history, folklore, fairy rings, curses, folk medicine and locals imbued with cures for illnesses.
Taking relevant 80 year old archival material from the National Folklore Collection as it starting point, the material that will make up this exhibition will be indebted to Allenwood, a village located in the Bog of Allen, which was established as a coaching post in the 19th century. My project’s investigations will trace the evolution of the townland’s landscape, scraping away and excavating layers of history, migration, industry, personal and collective memories, local folk knowledge and superstition, which through rapid modernization, indifference and sometimes embarrassment has been lost. In the archives, names of people today only known as elderly people, can be reencountered through their writings as schoolchildren.
Another point of departure is a poem by Irish poet Mairtin O’Direan called ‘An Gadscaoileadh’ in which the poet advises against abandoning one’s heritage. He uses the metaphor of a fisherman’s knot to warn against loosening one’s cultural ties before you have found a substitute with which to secure yourself. The poem hints at an intermediate state in which the subject may find themselves, existing wholly in neither place, but on certain levels operating consciously in both. Additionally this project derives from my personal interests in the folk and cultural practices and how these rituals are appropriate, filtered, sanitized, represented and reinterpreted by contemporary culture. In particular, the idea grew from a personal observations of the Celtic festival of Samhain and how has been absorbed worldwide, with generations of cultural dissemination transforming it far beyond its humble origins into the now internationally-recognizable Halloween. In some ways, this evolved celebration is an entirely new phenomenon that has usurped many practices and purposes native to the feast’s origins, leading sometimes to an uncomfortable mixture of unease and festivity.
Although I plan to exhibit the folkloric investigations at a later date is a variety of locations. For CuratorLab, the project has to be exhibited in Sweden. However this material must also be shown in Allenwood as the importance of local engagement is a vital part of the project. In part this is to avoid “othering” the community in which these tales originated. One suggestion for this exhibition is to take contemporary art away from its comfortable location in urban galleries and art centres, instead engaging a gallimaufry of locations in the village: the local pub, the Gaelic sports hall, the school, ruined vernacular architecture, boom-time housing developments, and the 19th century canal. These locations map different time periods in Allenwood’s history. The exhibition will explore methods telling the story of a micro-culture that allow for more insight than a mere recitation of historical facts. It will also question the importance of local knowledge in a wider culture that often yearns for the validation that academic empirical knowledge provides. Consisting of a variety of artworks from both Irish artists and international practitioners, the selected artists will engage with themes of place, mapping, memory, landscape, Irish domestic architecture and aspects of culture and heritage. It will engage the artists somewhat as ethnographers in a digital age, negotiating paths through centuries of established tradition and recent decades of newer developments.
This exhibition aims to foster discussion regarding the appreciation and preservation of local history and local idiosyncrasies. Through evolution and use, new traditions and belief systems are created, entangled with the old, but adapted to cater for modern audiences. But how do newer customs sit alongside native traditions? Do cultural practices lose their purposes and through evolution does meaning shift to meaningless? With reflective aspects pushed aside for the entertainment, are rituals reduced to mere theatrical re-enactments compete with stock characters or spruced-up shallow imitations of a once meaningful tradition? As culture is constantly evolving, the exhibition will develop and freeze a temporary culture within the spatial boundaries of the gallery, only existing for its duration. In some ways, this project and its employment of the curatorial, needs to retrace and remap a past, to view a current position before moving forward.
Biography
For my primary degree, I studied History or Art and Italian which was followed by a hastily chosen masters in Palladio and Palladianism. During my time at university, I was heavily involved in set design in UCD’s Dramsoc, a highly renowned student drama society which led to my involvement with several fringe theatre productions upon graduation during this time, I also worked in the education department at the National Gallery of Ireland. My professional engagement with contemporary art began in 2005 when I was offered a position in the Douglas Hyde Gallery, a public art gallery situated on the campus of Trinity College Dublin. During my time there I co-curated two exhibitions ‘Preponderance of the Small’ and ‘Holding Together’ and had wonderful opportunities to work with a high calibre of both Irish and international artists. In 2011, I moved to Sweden to participate in the Curating Contemporary Art Programme at Stockholm University where my thesis ‘Exhibiting the Hidden’ looked at the representation of the ‘occult’ in contemporary art and presented the work of Nadine Byrne in an exhibition ‘Between Worlds’. In Stockholm, I interned at Magasin 3, organized the Meetings programme at the Supermarket Art Fair and as a board member became involved in the running of Detroit Stockholm in addition to curating several shows in the space. Additionally in recent years, I have returned to some of my theatre roots by performing ‘The S.I. Witkiewicz Portrait Painting Firm’ at Absolute Fringe Festival, Dublin; Stoff, Stockholm and at The English Theatre Berlin. Future projects include ‘Couchsurfer’s Paradise’, an exhibition taking place in the homes of strangers; ‘Ritual Play’, Verkstad Konsthall, Norrköping, and ‘Faraway Longings’, Irish Embassy Berlin.