shanagolden
When we are lost and looking for a way forward, the path is rarely certain. False starts and even misdirection, force us to pause, recalibrate and reassess. Expecting one thing, we stumble upon another, and a new path is revealed. It’s a necessary meandering we undertake throughout our lives, always moving towards an understanding of who we are, and where we have come from.
Most of my life and through my work, I have been trying to understand my fragmented family history. I didn’t meet my biological father until I was in my twenties. His only presence in my life, were a few fragments, pieces of a disassociated puzzle that fed my fantasies. Not knowing who he was, he could be whoever I wanted him to be.
Later after we finally met, I was able to start to piece together a story of where I came from. But having arrived late, it often felt like someone else’s story and not one I was able to truly own. I became an Irish citizen and traveled back to County Limerick, to the villages of my ancestors to try and feel that sense of belonging and make peace with my history.
The work that resulted in that pilgrimage presents a series of black and white landscapes, paired with reframed found photographs. The landscapes are dark, forbidding. Returning to the homeland, I felt little connection, but more the burden of family secrets in the landscape, an impenetrability that offered only glimpses of a past I couldn’t really access or comprehend, where I found more questions than answers.
Upon my return, I began playing with family photographs. Accompanying the landscapes, they offer an antidote, deliberately over exposed, they float, like ghostly spirits and I felt a strong connection to their spirit and their energy. They are surrogates for family members I will never know but whose presence I feel everywhere.
These images are printed as archive pigment prints, in editions of 10 at 14 x 21 and 5 at 20 x 30 on Canson Rag Photographique paper.
Signed numbered and dated by the artist.
