#colm cille

[andrewdugganartist]

T U A T H  -  t h e  v i s i t o r -  a n  c u a i r t e o i r 

An Gailearai, Dún na nGall, 2023

Making Visible the Visceral and Personal connections between the body and place

Installation at An Gailearaí consists of an assemblage of disregarded construction material, small geometric sculptures, floor text, infra-red photographs, sound and two video projections.

Is machnamh lom, fileata agus meafarach é an taispeántas suiteáin seo ar an ngaol idir an daonnacht, an miotas agus an talamh.

Working with Performance Artist Hollie Miller, Composer Seán Ó Dálaigh and Camera Person Siobhán Dempsey, we created a multi layered work which draws inspiration from three dominant sources: the story of a banished Monk who returns to his land to settle a dispute blindfolded and on blocks of wood, a 1514 allegorical drawing by Hans Baldung Grien of a naked female figure walking with small spheres attached to her feet and the Myth of Tiresias, the blind prophet of Apollo and Thebes, famous for clairvoyance and for being transformed into a woman for seven years.

Here in this installation the ‘blind seer’ brings us, somewhat unsettlingly, through a built and natural landscape, there a sense of impending tragedy or traces of a previously traumatic event.

[silentambassadors]

Chuid eile i síocháin, Saint Columba.  Originally Irish, Saint Columba is credited with spreading Christianity through much of early Scotland, where, it is said, he encountered a “water beast” and subsequently banished it to the depths of the River Ness.  (....)  Columba died on this date in 597 at the age of 75.

Stamp details: Issued on: March 11, 1997 From: London, England MC #1684-1685

[bright-star-silver-ship]

Colm Cille in Iona

Now Ireland marks you for her own.

It is her that you think of.

Your monks can wound you.

'It is a Donegal day.'

'A soft day.'

<>

They pass you, a nod and a smile.

Little do they know,

the snag at your heart.

Is this the worst?

Or is it the snatch of song,

a phrase caught on the wind?

That drags you back to evening,

an hour earned to walk on the strand?

Sometimes you wish

they would not sing,

that they would never sing again.

<>

The horizon relieves you.

There is no sign,

no rise of land.

<>

What if I told you

the sun shone on the field of corn?

Diamonds dance on the waves.

It hurts my eyes,

and beyond that the young moon.

This a country of half-lights.

<>

You paint 

wave upon wave of translucent shade.

Carve black letters,

hunch-backed, ugly, sharp,

create

your manuscript.

<>

Luminosity,

a man's soul to be purified.

Shine for us.

We see your hope, your life,

the gold burn of sainthood.

<>

Do not forget us.

Now Ireland marks you as her own,

the grief of exile.

You, the most famed

of the diaspora,

could reach up and pluck the moon,

scatter the stars as flowers.

Clasp the dark cloak of night

to your shoulder,

and carry this emerald

to the firmament.

<>

Or bow to bless us.

Your beating heart,

your grateful centre.

<>

Leave us here to face the ocean.

Bowed over,

protected.

 We mark you as our own,

 recognise grief,

the lament of a man

who calls this beautiful place home.

<> <> <>

[erica-scourti]

In After Art, David Joselit argues in a shift from ‘object-based aesthetics’ toward ‘network aesthetics’ is underway, where artists stage a ‘performative mode of looking through which the single image and the network are visible at once’. In this mode, images have power and value due to their connectivity and relationship to other nodes of value, not for their intrinsic properties, echoing the way that “in informational economies of overproduction, value is derived not merely from the intrinsic qualities of a commodity (or other object), but from its searchability”, i.e. its ability to be found, and connected to other commodities.

From my blog post for Colm Cille's Spiral about media, formats and (kind of) Old English poem The Husband's Message http://www.colmcillespiral.net/the-husbands-message/

[erica-scourti]

But is a platform like Instagram or Facebook a medium, or a space for the sharing of other media, or both? Lev Manovich, in his new book Software Takes Command, argues that in the current situation, it may not be meaningful to even talk of different, discrete mediums at all; after all, the content of Instagram and its functioning as a platform, and beyond that the computer or mobile phone’s operating system, are all created in and made possible by software. He asks, “what happens to the idea of a “medium” after previously media-specific tools have been simulated and extended in software?” suggesting that a proliferation of media have been replaced by ‘one single monomedium, or a metamedium’.

From my post about the Husbands Message (kind of) for Colm Cille' Spiral

http://www.colmcillespiral.net/the-husbands-message/

[erica-scourti]

Recipients of personal video postcards sought

I am seeking recipients of personalised, private Instagram video postcards, for a commission I am working on: The Essex & London knot of Colm Cille’s Spiral, a series of contemporary art and literature commissions and dialogues rethinking the legacy of 6th Century Irish monk Colm Cille, or St Columba unfolds across Ireland and the UK, starting and ending in Derry-Londonderry for City of Culture 2013.

The London & Essex ‘knot’ of the spiral draws on the history of St. Cedd, who with his brother St. Chad, left Lindisfarne (Holy Island – site of the preceding Colm Cille’s Spiral knot) to establish new sites of culture and scholarship at a remove from the limitations of political territories. Cedd founded the Chapel of St. Peter-on-the-Wall at Bradwell-on-Sea in 654AD. Interested? Drop me a line and I'll let you know more- I'm asking recipients to TAG and TITLE the videos for me, with the resulting text being added as meta-data for a video gallery on Instagram, and in a another format in the exhibition in Derry. almostanglosaxonist.wordpress.com colmcillespiral.net