"I had a formula to guide me and whip me on through the thickets of difficulties I encountered: while walking the land, I am the pen on the paper; while drawing this map, my pen is myself walking the land."

Tim Robinson

 

 

Islands are “the loci of imagination, desire, hopes and fears, the goal of dreamers and mystics and misfits, multiplying moulds into which cosmographers and cartographers could pour both art and science, material spaces which the merchant venturer, pirate, colonist and governor could penetrate and exploit.”

Denis Cosgrove

 

 

ISLAND OBSERVATIONS

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Our experiences both on Inis Mór and during the Coronavirus lockdowns acted as the genesis for many of the themes which became the focus of our study. While working at home, we began to experience the strange timelessness that is brought about by both the endless repetition of a ceaselessly unchanging schedule, as well as the unnerving feeling of absurdity that one experiences from over exposure to objects which they previously have taken for granted. 

 

Taking this as a starting point, we began recording and investigating these phenomena through the use of photographic and graphic media. Such feelings were also encountered when we began site investigations on the Aran Islands. This may have been in part due to the timing of our visits. We had the rare opportunity to experience the normally busy islands devoid of tourists, which allowed us to absorb and experience the landscape in a unique way. During our time on the island we became fascinated by the clear geographical divide between the North and South ends of Inis Mór. The north side of the island consists of lush green fields and rolling hills. 

 

The south side of the island is made up of a barren limestone landscape, culminating in massive sea-cliffs stretching into the Atlantic Ocean. We became particularly taken with the southern half of the island, finding ourselves in a bizarre stone dessert, unlike anywhere we had been before. The landscape of Aran in no way conformed to our pre-figured notions of the Irish-countryside. Such an encounter with phenomena that wrestled with our preconceived notions of how landscape should be, creating the feeling of an alien landscape that generated a sense of detachment, of otherworldliness. These feelings were also evident in our encounters with the dry-stone walls which permeate the landscape of the island. The walls are manifested symbols that weave the cultural narrative of Aran into being. They are “both an artefact based on foundations of geology and climate, and a narrative, layer upon layer of our history and nature’s history intertwined’. Yet in this symbolism they are also manifestors of contradictions. While they appear to support a landscape that seems almost entirely natural and organic, it is a landscape of fabrications. Inis Mór is “a humanised landscape that has almost an urban intensity; unlike those significant cultural landscapes which are replete with intangible significance but untouched by the imprint of human beings, the surface of Aran is almost entirely built or made by man; it is virtually a handmade landscape.”

 

Reflecting on these experiences, we felt a resonance with some of the absurdist works of the playwright Samuel Beckett. In his plays he portrays a feeling of alienation brought on by encounters with the world around you. This mirrored our feelings of existential dread and alienation that we experienced both at home and in the island territory.

 

Neil O’Brien and Fergal O’Connor 

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Our personal experience of the islands certainly reorientated  our previous misconceptions, allowing us to contemplate upon these views. The islands became landscapes of truth, where we could bear witness to the unification of nature and culture. We started to examine the symbiotic relationships that exist between us and the world around us.  This harmonious way of living is best described as “sympoiesis”, a term coined by the philosopher Donna Haraway which means ‘making with’ and one that supports the idea that “nothing makes itself and nothing is really autopoetic or entirely self-organizing.… Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems’’

 

Katie Hamilton and Keeva O’Sullivan

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As Stephen Barber extracts from a letter that Artaud wrote to his biographer Paule Thévenin, Artaud “had been deeply struck by Robert Flaherty’s 1934 film Man of Aran.” Criticised for its depiction of a sensationalised reality of embellished hardship by forcing the actors to carry out tasks in detrimental conditions for theatrical effect, the film illustrates a primitive culture clutching for survival (often literally in some scenes) on the edge of the western world. With “Inis Mór’s filmic human figures desperately attempting to survive on a desolate, sloping terrain seascapes of roaring waves, and with its outbursts of spectacular prehistoric drumshaped clifftop hill-forts . . . the island as depicted in Man of Aran must have appeared an ideal location on which to envision and witness signs of his imminent Apocalypse.” Teetering the physical and mental edge, Artaud’s ‘apocalypse’ is formulated as death/ rebirth, an existential moment that considered the limits of humanity and the limits of the human psyche brought together in the same temporal space.

 

Brian Hand

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