Know That I Am Also At Sea, MA:AP Exhibition 2022

Almost all the work I’ve made this year originates in one site.

During a residency at Crawford Art Gallery, I have spent time photographing the building extensively, going room by room, trying to take it all in. It has been a year-long journey to the very bones of the building, and then past the bones and into an imaginary basement: a cavernous place housing lost plaster casts and hundreds of miscellaneous missing things. It’s a figment. As far as I know, there isn’t an actual basement beneath the building.

Above ground, the gallery is on the cusp of change. The two-year, multi-million euro Capital Redevelopment Project means that all 3,000 works of art in their collection will need to be moved off-site. Before that happens, everything must be accounted for. A serious archiving project is currently underway. When objects of unknown provenance are discovered in the building and cannot be matched to existing records, they are labelled ’Found in Collection’. This story contains some such objects.

It’s early days and I’m unsure. I want evidence of this building’s previous lives, so I direct my gaze (and my camera) upwards. Things have changed a lot at ground level while, up high, the dust has thickened and not much else has happened in the last hundred years.

To get my bearings, I compare my photographs to the historic ones on display in the gallery, trying to match sepia-toned images of old teaching rooms full of art students to the spaces I’ve been standing in. One room just won’t make sense until I try flipping the image on my phone camera. Bingo. The ancient print was made in reverse. That day I send an email asking whether the gallery would like me to reprint the picture the right way round. I could make an analogue print from the original negative, if they have it...

They don’t have it.

I think of the imaginary basement. During the course of our discussion about the negatives, it turns out that while they don’t have the ones I’d enquired about, they do have lots of boxes of old glass slides which have not yet been archived. Having given them a quick glance, the archivist believes that they are most likely teaching aids from the Cork School of Art. It is agreed that I may sign out a few boxes, have a look through them and, while I’m at it, digitise them.

On a sunny spring day I collect six boxes and bring them straight to the art college. There, I have been provided with a lockable cupboard where I can store them for a few weeks.

I begin to work my way through the first box, which is labelled ‘France.’ The slides feel cold and are heavier in the hand than you’d expect. Each one

has to be cleaned before it’s placed on the scanner bed. Black marks of a particular shape appear on my dust cloth. A flock of dust birds.

The slides are the three-inch square sort that would have gone upside down into a magic lantern projector. Their surfaces are very worn. Some bear initials and descriptive labels. I see a year on one: 1891. Their content seems to be mostly architectural, showing cathedrals and other buildings, columns and diagrams. They may be mass-produced: generic images of famous places which could be purchased in batches, the sort used for entertainment and education right up until the 1940s.

There’s the occasional anomalous one, though. There’s a man on a rooftop who, by his stance, doesn’t seem like he’s a stranger to the photographer. There is something reciprocal in his look. There’s another where a hatted figure seems to materialise out of the grey sand in a nondescript little bay.

I am intrigued by the hidden logic of the slides’ order in the box. Are they still in the order in which they were last used? I imagine the ancient lid being closed one day, at the end of a final outing to the lecture theatre.

Slide after slide. What am I looking at? What am I looking for? My mind goes to the larger project. I’ve been inwardly miserable about my Crawford residency. I’ve been overwhelmed, blinded by trying to look at it in its entirety. A site like this extends beyond its stony footprint and encompasses a whole buzzing network of matter and non-matter. It has layered histories and interesting thresholds between public and private realms. It has its own set of internal repeating cycles.

I find that whenever I’m in the building, everything I thought I was going to do has a troubling tendency to slip away from me. How does one engage with a public building in a personal way anyway? Do I place a listening hand on one of its crumbling plaster walls and sigh? Do I document its many generations of amputated plumbing? Am I carrying out a sort of survey?

I pull out the next cold slide and look at it. It is different to the others. Even before holding it up to the light I can see that no geometric, manmade shapes are visible. There is writing on the edge. Pale ink on the black gummed paper border.

‘Sunset, Bay of Biscay’. The glass is severely scratched. I give it the gentlest wipe with the dust cloth and then hold it up towards the window. As its label suggests, it is an image of a sun setting at sea. It is so beautiful that I hold my breath.

Dark, choppy waters take up the bottom third of the image and fade out toward the horizon line. In the scratched sky are wispy clouds and possibly smoke. In the middle third there is the vivid sun, burning out all the surrounding clouds on its way down. With my arm outstretched, I gaze for a bit as the sunshine illuminates the slide. A thought flashes across my mind: It’s the same sun.

I don’t want to look at the image for too long. I never want to get used to it. Weeks later, when I make huge drawings from it, I draw them in little sections, keeping most of the picture covered all the time and never looking at the whole thing together. It’s odd that it’s in the box at all. Did it form some part of a lecture on architecture, slotting in between the timeless things: drawings of ionic columns and gothic church interiors?

A sunset belongs to a specific day. One sunset equals one day. The sun in the slide hooks me into a new way of seeing all the other slides. Looking back through them I register rays of light falling in through windows and across the ground. I am looking at a place, but now, I am also looking at a day.

On the following Monday, I’m due back at the Crawford building. On my way in, I pause on the front step. Pointing the camera, I shoot straight up at the sun. It’s the first shot on the roll. It’s a timestamp. As I work in the building all that day, I am acutely aware of bright sunlight coming and going. Its dead straight lines reach into rooms as far as they can go, like unseeing fingers feeling their way. They describe the spaces and then move on. Their appearance is a reminder of our movement round the sun and of how this building has passed all its time.

Another day done. And another.

And another.