Blending the land and the body, Hold My Bones Together, considers how the landscape and the Irish identity are symbiotic in their shifts and cycles. It recounts a relationship with the land that has primarily been one of reliance and oppression, a turmoil of divinity and utility.

The work is informed by traces of a past where the land was seen as sacred, a life bearing entity bound by the elemental, to a time where oppression and cropland failings darkened a people, the land a harbinger of death, to now, when the land is rung dry, destitute and falsely reclaimed. The work seeks to understand how these cycles of birth and of death still inform our now estranged bodies – how have we, by cutting ourselves apart from the land, disjointed these natural processes of sustenance?

Rendering the world visible as clear, certain and rational, dominant perspectival representations cut us off from the intimate experience of the land, making it accessible to authority: the landscape has been reduced to the picturesque. Hold My Bones Together is a response to the idea that the language of the land as body came before we had names to render it small. To understand the land as a mnemonic of the knowledge preserved in its form, the work focuses in with close frames, evoking an intimate landscape that still remains in shreds around us. The body is used as a vessel to anatomise the inflictions of time and usage on the land.

Exhibited as part of ‘Talents 2025’ - Photo Museum Ireland

https://photomuseumireland.ie/exhibition/talents-2025/