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 abandoned in the 1800s when many starving Irish left the country during the Great Hunger or Potato Blight. The stone buildings were more recently restored by 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 with so little food, enough to cause those unknown villagers to leave their home. My own ancestors are primarily Irish and while I know little about them, I have been told they also left during the time period of the Great Hunger. 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 period that the original residents of Cill Rialaig abandoned their homes. Cyanotypes are often made using sunlight to create an image of an object. I used an infant’s dress, hair, rain, seaweed and other objects – as well as photographs of the area. After exposing the cyanotype, I toned them with black tea and stitched or glued lines with flax thread. I utilized dried gorse flowers, yarn spun from pieces of wool scavenged 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 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. This series conveys those feelings of melancholy, loss and past lives.