Slips and Wishes

Slips and Wishes

This work grapples borders of orientation, place and surface. Moving through a series of landscapes: a pond and window in Montreal, a river in Co.Cork and the coastline of Co.Dublin, a watery reaching is presented, alongside a personal travelogue of movement.
This work stems from researching St.James Well, Co.Sligo in the Duchas Schools Collection, a collection of folklore compiled by schoolchildren in Ireland in the 1930s. This healing well is in the rural townland of Geevagh, near to where my grandmother was born. Geevagh, meaning “the windy”, references a climatic feature of the area. This location has always been a focal site in my knowledge of my history. Slips and Wishes is an attempt to conjure and enter this ancestral space by circling and orientating other watery, windy and climate-shifting landscapes.

Slips and Wishes, moving image with sound and embedded documents and watercolours, 07:26, 2023.

Filmed in Quebec, Canada, Cork and Dublin, Ireland.

Narrated by the artist and Alexandra Sirard.