plaster
200 x 200 mm
edition of six
This is a drypoint print on cast plaster which I created to exhibit in the 3D/Off The Page show at the print workshop gallery.
Failure of the potato harvest in 1845 developed into the Great Famine of 1845 to 1851, a period which changed Ireland forever. These years had a momentous effect on people's lives and the social order of rural communities in Ireland. At that time, Ireland had been part of a disputed Union for over forty years. The vested interests of absentee landlords and their agents, coupled with the small size and poverty of most Irish tenant farms, left the population vulnerable to starvation when potato blight destroyed the main food crop in these smallholdings. Controversially, this happened while cattle, and cereal crops unaffected by blight, continued to be exported from Irish ports.
As parliament in London bickered over what to do, hundreds died, lost and abandoned in the ruins of their communities. Decades of poor government had failed to recognise and address the issues that ultimately led to approximately one million people dying through starvation and disease. At least the same number left Ireland in these desperate circumstances to save themselves.
The literature on the Famine is large and many details are still disputed by historians and political thinkers and activists. There are many public memorials remembering these years throughout Ireland and at the ports and places where the Irish diaspora arrived to begin new lives. Poetry and song commemorates and frames many events in personal and political terms and emotions still run high when the subject is discussed.
How then, to create a piece of work that touches on such a deep well of feeling and make it live in the imagination. When I made this piece, I set out without preconceptions. The gaunt and de-humanised figures created a landscape around themselves, lost words, like crudely scratched graffiti, making marks on the abandoned land, a sign and a warning. This is an epitaph for a land de-populated by hunger.
