Beyond the Ninth Wave

2017

‘When you live that far out, there is nowhere to go but deep inside.’ Kevin Barry, Beatlebone

The title refers to the islands of peace and eternal life believed to lie beyond the ninth wave in the North Atlantic, according to Irish mythology. Rooted in a real place, these images aim to bring the viewer closer to that island beyond the ninth wave.

In the 1980s, a group called the Atlantis Community moved from London to Inishfree, a remote island off the coast of Donegal, to practise primal scream therapy, a practice aimed at releasing deep-rooted, imprinted pain. The predominantly female community was labelled ‘The Screamers’ by the Irish media. The images in this series emerge from viewing the Donegal landscape as a metaphorical biography of the Screamers’ psyche, one in which trauma has played a significant role. Beyond the Ninth Wave explores this wounded island landscape.

This thinking also led to experimentation, as I searched for a way to express the physicality of this traumatised landscape. Each day on the island, I collected turf for the fire in a wheelbarrow. Turf, Ireland’s traditional fuel source, is formed from dead and decaying vegetation accumulated and compressed over millennia. One of its properties is that it preserves everything held within its environment, an inherent memory trapped inside.

Alongside making photographic images, I began exposing turf onto darkroom paper during daylight hours and fixing the prints late at night, creating lumen prints. Presented as triptychs, their patterns began to resemble sound waves.