Credits:

North of the west (2015) 8 minutes 47 seconds.

Concept: Mark Garry.

Cinematography: Padraig Cunningham.

Sound: Mark Garry and Sean Carpio.

Editing: Mark Garry and Padraig Cunningham.

North of the west was made for an exhibition entitled An afterwards at the Luan Gallery. 

North of the west was filmed during a storm at Mullaghmore Peninsula in County Sligo. The film is made up of six scenes of wide and close up shots of the Atlantic ocean filmed from the coast line.

North of the west acts as means of structuring an allegorical parallel between the sea and my paradoxical childhood relationship with the Christian faith – both powerful, immense, beautiful and potentially terrifying elements that surround the island of Ireland.

The film aspect of the exhibition, as with the other aspect of the exhibition An Afterwards engaged in a retrospective examination of the most dominant socio geographic elements characteristic of my childhood. These were the Catholic church and living on an island surrounded by the sea. This film acted as a means of structuring an allegorical parallel between the sea and my paradoxical childhood relationship with the Christian faith – both powerful, immense, beautiful and potentially terrifyingly omnipresent elements that surround the island of Ireland.

North of the West attempts to engage a sense of wonder but a more complex associative and socially constructed sense of wonder. This critical locating merges three inter-related discursive elements. Site and context specificity, the transcendental in film making, the sublime and the Paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. These three elements combine as a means of approaching the films subjects. i.e. religion or more specifically Irelands complex relationship with religion, and our associative and topographical relationship with the sea. In this film I am proposing that there is a recognition of an analogous relationship with both the sea and religion.

The film was shot at Mullaghmore Peninsula, County Sligo. By locating the film here acts as a means to exploit a number of associative connections that relate to religion, politics and cultural association. This particular geographic site has become synonymous with a specific historical event. On the 27th of August 1979 Louis Mountbatten and one of his grandsons, Nicholas and a local boy Paul Maxwell died when a remotely detonated bomb exploded on their leisure boat off the coast of Mullaghmore. Another passenger, Doreen Knatchbull Brabourne died from her injuries the day after the bombing. The bomb was planted as part of an armed paramilitary campaign undertaken by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) that took place between 1969 and 1997. This campaign was aimed at ending British rule in Northern Ireland, in order to create a united Ireland. This bombing was particularly noteworthy in that Mountbatten was a remarkably high profile victim. He was the second cousin of Queen Elizabeth the  second and has served as Supreme Allied Commander during the latter part of the Second World War, the last Viceroy of India and was the Chief of the British Defence Staff the head of the British Armed Forces. In addition to the social status of its victims, and the overt relationship between religion and politics the other interesting characteristic of the location of this atrocity was the associative relationship with this specific topographical location. The North West of Ireland is tied up with particularly romanticised connotations and associations of the Irish psyche. This bombing took place not in the streets of Derry or Belfast but in the sea between Donegal and Sligo, this coastline was the setting for many of Paul Henry’s paintings, (whose instrumentalization by the state has been noted earlier in this text.) This bombing also took place a couple of miles from to the birthplace of the famous politician, revolutionary, socialist and suffragist Constance Markiewicz née Gore-Booth and this place is also closely aligned with the life and work of one of Ireland greatest poets and Nobel Laureate W.B Yeats. The bombing taking place in this particular location with these particular set of cultural associations made it particularly resonant within the history of the conflict form a Southern Irish perspective and in a way one could suggest that the bombing symbolically fractured Irelands idealised senses of itself. This divisions in the conflict were constructed in religious terms, as a Catholic from the South of Ireland you were by proxy aligned with the ideas and actions of Irish Republican Nationalists. There was an inherent sense of responsibility and guilt, that was tied up in shame by association. This sense of shame was magnified by the subsequent emergence of the Catholic church as a space of misplaced moral priority in terms of its abuse of its power and treatment of the poor and vulnerable in Ireland.

The soundtrack for the film, played on vinyl record, comes from another of Garry’s collaborative works directly engaging with the sea. Titled Drift, the record is the outcome of a musical performance, film and recording project that took place in Detroit, Michigan and Horseshoe Bay, Sherkin Island, off the coast of West Cork. This performance incorporated Aeolian harps, a brass section and a saxophone player.