Soldered brass, steel, 21 x 33 x 12, 2018.
Created in residence at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Ireland.
The work holds together the two things Irish song has always held together: a landscape and a voice. A single wire line runs through the frame, rising and falling in loose swells. It reads as the profile of hills and as the contour of a melody, and the two readings can’t be separated, because in the song tradition the land is what gets sung about and the tune is how it is carried.
The line is continuous and unaccompanied, which is the condition of sean-nós singing: one voice, no instrument, the melody elaborated with turns and ornaments the singer adds. The scrolls and the leaf at the right play that role, curling off the line where the contour descends. The rings sit along it at different heights and sizes, like notes on an unruled staff, some open and light, some heavy. The single oval with a bar across it breaks the pattern and reads as a note held longer than the rest.
The broad arc beneath is a hull, and the fine line above is the coast it leaves. Emigration songs are a large part of the Irish repertoire, and in them the country exists as something sung because it can no longer be seen. The work balances on a single point, so the hull is afloat and poised, carrying the hills and the song as its cargo. A hull points two ways, though. The form that carries the emigrant out also brings the visitor in, and the symmetrical tips, each ringed, give the vessel no fixed bow. Made in a residency far from home, the song can be one of arrival as well as departure, a landscape taken in by someone passing through and written down as a line.
