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Completed 04 January 2014. Screenprinting, drawing, acid etching, sandblasting and other processes on cradled birch panel (centre) and 20-gauge steel bonded to cradled birch panels (two side panels).  67"x23"x 7/8". Continuing with boundary language, memory, voyages, travelling, searching, exploration...using images collected on my various perigrinations. The central panel is based on a photo of a schooner model in a window in a shed in Hearts Delight, Newfoundland, a small community on the western side of the Avalon Peninsula overlooking Trinity Bay (2013). The left panel is the cliff edge at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump near Fort Macleod, Alberta (2009). The right panel is the view from the cliff-edge wall of Dún Aonghasa on the western side of Inis Mor, the largest of the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland  near Galway (2011).

The construction of Dún Aonghasa (the 'Fort of Aonghas') was probably begun about 3,000 years ago, possibly as a final refuge for the Fir Bolg, one of the indigenous peoples of Ireland, after they were driven westwards by the invading Tuatha Dé Danann ('People of the Goddess Danu'). Further defensive works were added, including three additional defensive walls and ditches, the latter probably built during the Iron Age about 500BCE. These walls are further protected by extraordinary chevaux de frise,  fields of massive upright sharp-edged stones that severely restrict any access to the dun except along two or three designated paths. The edge of the dun is the cliff itself, dropping a hundred metres to the ocean below. The Iron Age is the great age of heroes in various mythologies, with a confusion of gods, battles, and narratives spanning centuries. The collapse of the Bronze Age which coincided with the beginnings of the Iron Age - and iron weapons - is associated with the sacking of major cities across the Mediterranean area, and the building of hilltop forts, possibly as refuges for survivors during the thousand-year Greek Dark Ages that followed. This corresponds to the fall of the Mycenaean empire beginning around 1200BCE, and includes such mythological events as the destruction of the city of Troy. That event generated Homer's Illiad and Odyssey, in which the poet uses several collective names in reference to the Greeks, including the Achaeans and the Danaans (which included Odysseus). Other contemporary records refer to mysterious Sea Peoples, bands of sea-borne and possibly homeless raiders operating in the Mediterranean, who may have included Homer's Odyssians returning from their ten-year adventure at Troy. Egyptian sources indicate that this was not just random pirating by the enigmatic Sea Peoples, but full-scale migrations of populations looking for new homes.  Is it possible that the Tuatha Dé Danann who drove the Fir Bolg to the utmost extremities of Ireland at about this time were Homer's Danaan Sea Peoples? The Irish Book of Invasions attributes Greek origins to both the Fir Bolg and the Tuatha Dé Danann. In Dante's Inferno, Ulysses (Odysseus) relates an alternate ending to the Odyssey in which he travels beyond the Pillars of Hercules (into the Atlantic) in search of new adventures. Three thousand years later...I am standing in a hill fort at the edge of the world, wondering what deeds, famous and infamous, occurred here, and have been long forgotten, or retold and woven into Ireland's complex mythological fabric... 'Now the Fir Bolg were all slaughtered in that battle, as we have said, save a few; and those of them who survived fled before the Tuatha De into the outermost isles and Islets of the sea, so that they dwelt in them after that...' (from the Irish Book of Invasions).

Chevaux de frise on the approach to Dun Aonghasa

Dun Aonghasa, Inis Mor (Aran)

If we think of what we now know about human and cultural evolution as a very long history of shape-shifting, stories told by shamans for thousands of years, it's not hard to imagine that creation myths are pre-literary attempts to explain the apparent magic of the human situation, although not necessarily that of the human condition (art, and to a certain extent religion, in all their various forms attempt to do that, amongst other things). Our solid relationship with land, as opposed to a tenuous one with water, is a major part of the mystery, and it's interesting to see how creation myths frequently address the idea that the gods and/or goddesses who created us were themselves water gods (the goddess Danu, for example), or brought us forth from water even as they created solid land for us to live on. As animals of land and air, we have an uneasy, fascinated and fascinating affinity for water - and water's nemesis, fire.  Earth, Water, Air, Fire...the classical four elements which drove alchemy, later science. It has only been since the Renaissance that we have been able to develop a more complex exploration of the elements and our place in the universe. We tend to associate those developments with explorations that gave us the so-called New World, courtesy of Columbus, for example, but this is increasingly being seen, at least partially, as a construct to establish/explain/justify the assumed superiority of certain peoples in the general hierarchy of human evolution. There is evidence that the ancient Greek navigator Pytheas (c.300BCE) reached Ireland, and possibly travelled by sea along the coast of what is now Norway, as far north as the Arctic Circle where he and his crew encountered ice and fog, such that '... land properly speaking no longer exists, nor sea nor air, but a mixture of these things, like a "marine lung", in which it is said that earth and water and all things are in suspension as if this something was a link between all these elements, on which one can neither walk nor sail...'. In Greek the phrase  'marine lung' also apparently refers to jellyfish, an appropriate comparison to this tangible, moving but amorphous boundary area between earth, water and air...What we don't know about the ancient navigators is almost certainly considerably more than what we do know.

The  cliff edge at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump...it's higher than it looks!

On another continent, probably but not necessarily unknown to the ancient Greeks, other indigenous peoples were creating and immersing themselves in their own mythologies and histories. For the plains people of what is now Canada and the USA, the cycles of living revolved around the migrations of animals, notably the enormous herds of buffalo. At about the time that the Fir Bolg were being driven to the western cliff edges of Ireland,  North American indigenous plains tribes had already been using cliffs along the western boundary zone between mountains and prairies for thousands of years to harvest the buffalo, herds of which followed the grazing across the prairies and into the foothills over the course of spring and summer. As the buffalo began to move back towards wintering grounds on the prairies as autumn descended from the mountains, they could be carefully maneuvered  towards the relatively shallow sandstone cliffs and driven over them to be slaughtered. Until the introduction of the horse by Europeans around 1600AD, this was the only feasible way to hunt buffalo efficiently. For North American First Nations, a 'book of invasions' would be relatively small: some 10-12,000 years of a relationship with the land that provided everything, tribal battles over territories and mythologies created therefrom, followed by 500 years of invasive destruction up to the present day. Their cliff edge, like that faced by the Fir Bolg, is cultural, psychological, physical...the boundary between being and nothingness.

 
The boat? For some reason, I am drawn to boats in windows. Boats are the ultimate boundary zone vessel, beautiful in form and function, and windows are, in these cases, the invisible boundaries the models inhabit. People who live by the ocean often have boats in their windows...while considering this, it did occur to me that I've never seen a farmer with a tractor in his window. I may need to find one.

All of the above, of course, has only tangential relationships with what the work is really about, which is not a complete mystery to me but at the same time is not particularly easy to explain...

Some information I've looked at...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart%27s_Delight-Islington

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-Smashed-In_Buffalo_Jump

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BAn_Aonghasa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pytheas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danu_%28Irish_goddess%29

http://www.donaldcorrell.com/tales/invasions.html