This installation marks the completion of a journey of exploration and investigation, a series of encounters with the past, with memory, place and above all migration undertaken by Rachael Flynn. In making this journey Rachael has also undergone a process of coming to terms with her own identity as an artist while reconnecting with her family’s story – in particular that of her grandmother Agnes McBride who, like so many before and after her, left her home – on the Rosguill Peninsula – as a fifteen year old girl to cross the Irish Sea and forge a new life as an independent woman, before eventually marrying another Irish exile (Leitrim) to start the Scottish branch of the Flynn family. This work for Folie: Between Incompleteness and the Imagination is made of three parts involving installation, an artists book, and both live and recorded performances.
Flynn’s work demonstrates an endeavour to forge connection with audience through connecting personal family stories to the wider cultural histories in which they are situated. The physical journeys taken by her Irish ancestors has found physical manifest in her creative practice handling, as she searches to represent notions of separation, loss, distance, absence and the internal and external boundaries of a personal sense of landscape. Moreover, emerging from such engagement, Flynn notes a realisation that through her practice she is seeking or fostering a means to reconnect or make a devotional gesture towards these family stories.
BACK TO HERITAGE 2014 