Credits:

Bridges Burned and Backs Turned (2014) 4 Minutes 

Concept: Mark Garry.

Cinematography: Fergal Ward.

Colourist: Michael Higgins.

Editing: Mark Garry and Tadhg O’Sullivan.  

Commissioned by the Model Home of the Niland collection

Bridges Burned and Backs Turned was made for an exhibition entitled A Winter Light at The Model Home of the Niland collection in Sligo.

This silent film is a depiction of a hand repeatedly releasing a white feather, that slowly falls downwards and gets caught just before it hits the ground, this action repeats over three minutes until finally the feather is not caught and is blown away out of shot. During A Winter Light this film work was presented with two paintings by Irish artist Paul Henry from the Model’s Niland collection. These paintings are “Early Morning on Donegal Lough” circa 1917-1918 and “The lake of the Tears of Sorrowful Women” circa 1916-1917.

This film referenced the social reality of post-colonial Ireland. Where when we as a nation, when freed of our colonial oppressors engaged in the widespread incarceration of our own people, usually the poor or vulnerable elements of our society. And while all elements of society were aware of these atrocities, we maintained a silence around them. We as a nation were complicit in these atrocities by proactively engaged in silence as a mode where a kind of buried silence was enabled, where each governing aspect of society was complicit via their silence.

This film work was presented with two paintings by Irish Paul Henry again from the Model’s Niland collection. These paintings are “Early Morning on Donegal Lough” circa 1917-1918 and “The lake of the Tears of Sorrowful Women” circa 1916-1917. These Paintings

are somewhat unusual for Henry in that they are quite subdued depictions of the Irish landscape, with muted colours and compositionally minimal.  

Henry’s painted depictions of the Northwest of Ireland. Portrayals of rural Ireland, paintings of people engaged in manual labour working on the land or at sea. Paintings of stacks of turf and small cottages in desolate landscapes. These images were instrumentalised by the Irish state in several ways, his images were used by the Irish tourist board to ‘sell Ireland abroad’ and in many ways became pictorial mechanisms for how Ireland would be viewed from abroad but also how Ireland as a nation would associatively define itself going forward as an independent nation. I viewed this instrumentalization as a deeply problematic romanticism of poverty and a semiotic washing of colonialism.

Bridges Burned and Backs Turned tried to engage carefulness as an entity and its display with the paintings attempted to make this work act as a discourse in relation to nationhood. This collection of artworks acted as a poetic methodology to speak about the way Ireland’s citizens acted towards one another since our Independence where the personal and political intersect.