Impermanence. This, I think is something so prevalent on this amazing island. Inis Meáin presents modernity, and its illusion of the ‘new’, with a different temporal scale, indeed the simultaneous overlapping of times.
This can be captured in the Japanese aesthetic and Buddhist concept of ‘mujo’, of the beauty found in objects that demonstrate the impermanent nature of all things. Anticipating modern physics, this 2000 year old knowledge understood that all form, all those things we see as solid, concrete, permanent are in fact transient.
The first image is from Dún Chonchúir one of two pre-historic forts on the island. The impressive stone structure, which still dominates the island’s landscape, has been repurposed to form walls enclosing small fields. Here we see another aspect of non-human activity capturing the limestone as a purchase for its own growth. Eventually, this stone may fall, and be covered in vegetation, the controlling intentions of the fort’s manufacture being rendered no more than the limestone rock from which it was built. The second image follows on, also from the area around the fort. Wind and rain have worked on this large mass of stone to create this beautiful image. No intentional thought, no concept, no model of beauty. This is the heart of Wabi Sabi aesthetic, the simple recognition of how beauty can be created from decay and transformation, in the absence of intention.
Sat having coffee and cake in the craft shop in the heart of habitated Inis Meáin, I noticed this metal object nestled in the stone wall. I have no idea how it got there, whether it was placed deliberately and for some purpose (including aesthetic), or placed temporarily and forgotten. All that really matters is that it is there. There is, initially, a juxtaposition of the ‘man-made’ metal and the ‘natural’ stone of the wall. But then the mind notes that the ‘natural’ wall is of human construct, that human intent lies behind its form and function. Then, the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘man-made’ begin to weaken, weathered by this new reality. Then you notice that both are weathered, by rain, heat, cold, wind. But more than this, the eye is drawn to the transformations occurring on both stone and metal. The beauty of the rusting metal is enacted by the breakdown of its surface due to moisture and sea salt. The stone becomes the habitat for lichen, and specifically Caloplaca decipiens. This produces its own rust-like patterning on the stones.
Later, by the Old Pier, I saw more of this brother and sister display, the complementarity of metal, limestone, moisture, salt, and living organism.
Then there is the rope (again at the Old Pier) and the fossilised shells on stone near Synge’s Chair. The first reminds me that it is impossible to know these islands without considering the relationship between it inhabitants and the sea, and especially fishing (though that has died away as a serious economic proposition). The Old Pier (’old’ because it has been replaced by a new pier some way away that is better able to take larger boats) has apparently become the place around which the little fishing that still happens revolves. So why not find a nylon rope encrusted with mussel shells. This combination or blurring of the ‘natural’ and ‘man-made’ I find highly attractive. The articulation of the two produces something new, something more than each part, something neither just ‘natural’ or just ‘man-made’. So, this brings me to the final image. Here we are confronted with an ancient moment, when these limestone strata were laid down as sediment in a tropical sea some 350 million years ago. And in this stone, now furnished as human culture in the form of walls, we see this ancient moment, this tropical location in the calcified shells that pockmark its surface.
