Let your eyes adjust to the dark...

Some of that Sunday art review-reading feeling has stuck with me, that coherency which somehow creates an aura around the art of being brought fully formed into the world. Maybe I should at least pretend to know (everything) about the art I am making before it arrives, but that knowledge comes at me sideways. From a chat, a blog, a list, the light. This particular work however, is already and always here. Elemental, seasonal, cyclical and simple to the point to breathtaking. Well, when the light shifts a particular way, it does mine. The work has taken her time to come into being, even though it is present every time I/we open our eyes. To know this place and the other-worldly architecture, this shelter in a field (with horses) this former gunner training ground, this filmhouse, this echo chamber. To know when the light comes from the line of trees beyond, over the roofs of the houses nearby, and setting towards the curve of Benevenagh. It is happening with help and support from pals, equally enthused and thoroughly experienced with photography as an altered state and embodied way of navigating the world. In this month of September 2021, when screens are showing events that are still hard to make sense of, whether of archival footage from twenty years ago or live streaming of turmoil and upheaval happening too fast to comprehend, visitors are restricted but welcome, to a Limavady field on the north coast, this Saturday 18/9/21. The Camera Obscura @theDome will take place for one day only, and without overwhelming the metaphorical, the experience will be both of the world as it seems, and as it actually is - shifting, upside down and back to front.

Camera Obscura @theDome supported by Binevenagh Coastal & Lowlands Landscape Partnership. Collaboration with and thanks to Martha McCulloch, Harry Kerr, Gail Mahon, Grace McAlister and Caolan McDermott.

Genesis Lost exhibition, Artlink (2019) © Mhairi Sutherland Photography by Martha McCulloch

PS: Mother's Day

‘It is a frightful pass of a quarter of a mile’ so begins a 17th century description of this place in the Glenties district of Donegal. The gloomy, tentative travel writer continues; ‘the descent of the road being steep, the mountain rising over it to a vast height and often dropping down rocks from its abrupt precipices and the no less frightful lake below, sure to swallow up the traveller if he makes the least false step.’ Although I don’t recognise the tone of dismal horror, the descriptors of ‘vast height, abrupt precipices, lake below’ are both familiar and fleeting. Memories flash like the scudding clouds above my mother’s resting place amongst the whipping grass, high above the depth of dark water below.

Although I knew that my grandfather Manus was born at the end of the nineteenth century near Dungloe or thereabouts, when I recently began the search for his birth certificate, I was looking for the usual form of familiar townland name in the area - Meenacross perhaps, or Tully, Cruit or Craghyboyle. Getting nowhere, I was mystified - surely our silent ceremonies, taking place over the years and decades, scattering ashes through the air and falling to the earth, occasionally whirling in the wind - couldn’t have been in the wrong place? My turquoise-eyed, gentle grandfather spoke very little about his early life, silent mostly about his origins, except finally, in his wish to return. Over time, we also brought his daughter - my mother Isabella, her brother Peter and lastly, his own wife, Hannah, from Newhaven on the edge of Leith, to this place.

Scrolling through townland variations and genealogy sites, exasperated, all of a sudden a townland with a sub-title caught my eye - ‘this townland is known as Lough Salt’. Not only had I found the right place, but the homeplace itself was named for this body of water, these cliffs, steep-sided and rising sheer from the waters below. Incredibly, it seemed to me, my grandfather’s birthplace, in his mother and father’s home, was here certified, written in a looping, copperplate hand as ‘Lough Salt’.

Lough Salt road, graphite drawing from polaroid, 2021 © Mhairi Sutherland