Completed 23 February 2013. Approximately 57" long x 19" wide x 3/4" deep (150cm x 50cm x 2cm). Screenprinting and drawing, etching and sand-blasting on three wood panels and steel (please click on image for larger view). The two wing panels are 22-gauge sheet steel bonded to wood panels; the centre panel is wood. Images again from 'boundary zones': the central image is of an Irish
currach that was sitting by a stone wall near the northern-most tip of Inishmore of the Aran Islands off Galway. In May of 2011 I went for a walk in Ireland, which had as its main destination the Aran Islands. I wanted to visit the famous iron-age fort of Dun Angus, amongst other places, but the weather was atrocious. I was staying at a B&B near Kilronan, and the owner suggested that if I walked into town to the hotel I could easily find someone who would take me wherever I wanted to go. So I did, and ended up in a van with Paul and a group of American nuns who wanted to see some holy sites near the tip of Inishmore. Paul was an extraordinary guide, and an avowed heathen, so the trip, albeit only about half an hour in length, was hilarious, moving and enlightening, although not necessarily so for the nuns. If you ever want to meet Paul, he apparently worships most afternoons at his church, the American Bar in Kilronan, which is actually owned by a Canadian, according to him, though it was his understanding that no self-respecting Canadian would ever be caught
drinking in a bar of such a name, although it was otherwise perfectly acceptable etc., etc. The currach of the Aran Islands is a beautifully hand-built craft designed for the north Atlantic, somewhere between a freighter canoe and a Newfoundland dory, usually rowed but capable of taking a sail. Its agility and uses on the water, and the skills of the islanders who use them, are discussed at length in J.M. Synge's
The Aran Islands (1911). I walked back from the tip of the island to Dun Angus (another story in itself!), and eventually from there back to the turf fire and a few pints in Tigh Joe Mac's bar in Kilronan. One
thinks on these walks, as Bruce Chatwin and others were fond of observing. In this case, I was thinking of - or perhaps just absorbing - the power of wind, water, myth, history...all those 'powers' that are constantly with you in places like Aran, or the Orkneys north of Scotland (source of the left image, the stones at Stenness), or of coming down from the Crowsnest Pass of the Canadian Rockies into the foothills of Alberta, and seeing since my last trip through there a decade ago the sprouting of hundreds of wind turbines along the ridges of the Eastern Slope (the image on the right) intercepting the powerful and constant winds that drive out from the pass and blow incessantly across that part of the prairies. I was amazed but not happy to see them, as that particular vista was amongst my favourite experiences of descending into the flatlands that stretched ahead for another 500 miles...the land that is, in fact, my home. Vandalized as it were in my absence, yet even as it struck me as such, I knew it was better than the alternatives...As I passed these all-but-silent towers, I was reminded again of the constructs to and of power - and of the people who do the constructing - that are both alien yet strangely beautiful in their purposes.
