Island

• published: 20 Apr 2015
• views: 3

A piece shot on the depopulated island of Inishlacken on an artists residency curated by Rosie Mc Gurran. The piece features the voice of my Grandmother Jean Mc Quillian, who was an artist herself. It is from her that I get my love of painting. Artist Statement. “Peig Sayers, the famous Blasket Island writer, told me from her hospital bed, that if the minimum had been provided on her island home - water, electricity, a pier, a ferry - the community would have remained on the island.” (O’Peicín, 1989: 13) In terms of the movement of people there are three different kinds of places in the world, those that people stay in, those that they move to and those that they leave. The first two are familiar to almost everyone, we live in them. But what about the places that people leave. Throughout Ireland there has been a gradual depopulation of the off shore islands due to the islanders moving to the mainland or emigrating. One of the problems the islands faced being that they lie scattered around the coast and were each unimportant, tiny parts of their counties. Bad weather could mean weeks without crossing choppy seas. Due to the difficulty and expense of providing the necessary infrastructure the government in the 1960s and 1970s often had a policy of relocating the islanders to the mainland. Examples of this would be Inishshark and more recently Tory island in the north where the islanders resisted such a campaign. This piece is about a deserted island. It explores the themes of emigration and relocation to the mainland and the idea that an island is a separate alien place to the mainland, an in between space that is apart and quite different as its dislocated from the mainland. The piece addresses the island’s isolated beauty and the way that modern life has cast aside once useful objects, the way the houses are set among the sea weed and fleece for example. Sea weed was once extensively gathered to make gelatin and sheep fleeces once used for knitting, are now simply discarded after periodic shearing. The houses are also lit from within on St Johns night and in the shots you can just about make out the bonfires lining the coast on the mainland. St Johns night is an old tradition where Bonfires are lit along the coast of Conemara. It dates back to pagan times where midsummers day was the time when fire and water acquired medicinal qualities. The poem in the piece was written by Anna o Toole who emigrated to the states from Inishlacken in the early part of this century and it explores the sense of loss an islander has once they leave for the mainland. It is read out by her great grand daughter on her return to the island. As one can see in Anna's poem, even when islanders move to the mainland, or emigrate, their homeland plays a major part in their consciousness. Even if the homeland exists only in memory the idea of return is critical for many dispersed communities and it extends beyond those who personally remember the home country as we can see with Lauren, Anna's great grand daughter who reads out Anna's poem in this piece. Even if they do return to the same place, that place may be profoundly changed (Oxfeld and Long 2004). One can see this on Inishlacken. The island has been uninhabited for forty years but before that it was inhabited for thousands of years. For the first time the islanders have to deal with the idea of their original home becoming a ghost town. The rusty skeleton of the windmill once used to pump fresh water into the reservoir tank, a scattering of cottages all in ruins and grass grown boreens undermined by rabbit burrows are all that remain of a once thriving community.