Unknown Ancestors

Unknown Ancestors was made when I was an artist in residence at Cill Rialaig in Ballinskelligs, Ireland. During the residency, I was housed in a restored cottage on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The village at Cill Rialaig was built in the 1700s and later abandoned. The stone buildings were more recently restored with the help of the Irish government. During my stay, it was cold and damp and the heat was not functioning. I thought constantly of the previous residents and how it must have been a hard place to survive, enough to cause those unknown villagers to leave their home. My father’s family was Irish and I have been told they left Ireland during the time period of the Great Hunger when over a million Irish died from starvation as the primary crop, the potato, failed. Between one and two million emigrated during that time. I felt their unseen presence in the stone, the wind and the ocean. Unknown Ancestors was created using the cyanotype process, which was prevalent in the 1840s – the same time period when many Irish left their country. Cyanotypes are made using UV light to create an image of an object. I used an infant’s dress, hair, seaweed and other objects – as well as photographs of the area. I chose objects and images to reflect previous lives as well as photographic images that evoke the place. After exposing the cyanotype, I toned each one with black tea and stitched or glued lines with flax thread. The black tea subdues the bright blue color of the cyanotype into a duller brown and blue. Flax has been grown and utilized in Ireland for centuries. I also utilized dried gorse flowers, yarn spun from pieces of wool found in the area and antique bone buttons. The use of tea, flax and wool thread, gorse flowers, bone buttons, the cyanotype process as well as the images chosen tie this work to the specific subject matter of lost lives in Ireland - as well as to the universal truths of suffering, starvation and emigration that are ever present in the world today. I created this artwork as an expression of the unseen presence of both my own ancestors and the previous families who lived and worked in this place. I felt their existence during my time at Cill Rialaig. The series conveys those feelings of melancholy, loss and past lives.