Migration Memories uses family photographs, archival imagery, photography and text. The art work explores the experience of migration within generations of my family who travelled between Scotland and Ireland from the 1930s to the present day. The work focusses on my mother who migrated at the age of 16, from Donegal to Glasgow in 1945, with Gaelic as her first language. I am interested in these cycles of migration and the flow of generations of people back and forward across the Irish sea. Through recollection and the re-working of photography, I attempt to reframe my mother’s experiences and explore this magnetic pull between people and place.
My grandmother’s photograph collection, kept in a tin in her kitchen cupboard, studio portraits from the 1930s of well-dressed family and friends taken at the popular Jerome Photography Studio, Glasgow. A new self-image to send home to loved ones. I also found official documents; medical tests, birth certificates and my mother’s passport required to travel from Derry to Scotland to find work.
I became aware of elliptical shapes as repeated patterns in the images and documents; the frame of the photograph, the official stamp to allow entry into another country, the lens of the eye, orbiting between closeness and distance, the desire to belong and the need for social integration.
"Migration, Memory and Mimesis" was a group exhibition in the Linen Hall Library, Belfast (5th Sept- 28th Sept. 2018) bringing together the work of Lynne Connolly (University of Chester), Moira McIver (UU) and Dr. Mary White (University of Loughborough). The exhibition explored ideas and experiences of migration and conflict in post-colonial Ireland and used a range of traditional and contemporary photographic processes and methods.
My grandmother’s photograph collection, kept in a tin in her kitchen cupboard, studio portraits from the 1930s of well-dressed family and friends taken at the popular Jerome Photography Studio, Glasgow. A new self-image to send home to loved ones. I also found official documents; medical tests, birth certificates and my mother’s passport required to travel from Derry to Scotland to find work.
I became aware of elliptical shapes as repeated patterns in the images and documents; the frame of the photograph, the official stamp to allow entry into another country, the lens of the eye, orbiting between closeness and distance, the desire to belong and the need for social integration.
"Migration, Memory and Mimesis" was a group exhibition in the Linen Hall Library, Belfast (5th Sept- 28th Sept. 2018) bringing together the work of Lynne Connolly (University of Chester), Moira McIver (UU) and Dr. Mary White (University of Loughborough). The exhibition explored ideas and experiences of migration and conflict in post-colonial Ireland and used a range of traditional and contemporary photographic processes and methods.
