Artist: Gareth Kennedy.
Gareth Kennedy explores a critical play with material, place, trace and legacy in Carrow Teigue and surrounds. Research visits to national museums and archives holding archaeological and folkloric material relating to Erris have been supplemented with on the ground meetings with inhabitants. Additional meetings with archaeologists, folklorists, dendrochronologists, Bord Na Mona personnel and pollen analysts have lent diverse perspectives on how to decode and understand an expanded sense of time in relation to contemporary Carrow Teigue.
Kennedy is interested in how to interface this museological and specialist knowledge with the rich knowledge and lived experience today's inhabitants hold embodied within themselves. Interfacing material from the museum, the collection and the archive with skill sets and material from Carrow Teigue to develop an experimental material culture, the intent is to then ceremonially bury material outcomes, thus engaging the bogs chemistry and it's uncanny ability to hold things in stasis in time.
This 'time rite' will be a publicly staged and 'reverse engineered' experimental archaeological dig. It will be dually informed by specialist knowledge married to the genus loci of Erris.
Depending on how best to 'measure time', the vision is to unbury and recover the material culture from the bog at a time collectively agreed upon as prescient. Visit project website for more information:www.northmayoarttrail.com/new-artworks