Sinéad Mercier and Michael Holly, featuring Eddie Lenihan:
Men Who Eat Ringforts. Co-published with Gaining Ground, a public art programme based in County Clare.
Meg Hadfield and Cóilín O’Connell lead an open reading group with ‘Men Who Eat Ringforts’ and a screening of FEEDERS.
MEN WHO EAT RINGFORTS
Ringforts are Ireland’s most common archaeological monument, liberally spread throughout the countryside. Seen as circular enclosures in the rural landscape and many existent for hundreds and thousands of years, they are often overgrown with trees and bushes, forming an unassuming yet encompassing presence, one grown from habitation, lived life and ritual.
With increasing regularity, the Irish state has sanctioned the destruction of ringforts as part of motorway schemes and infrastructural development. How can we understand a nation hell-bent on the demolition of its own history for the expedient delivery of perceived notions of progress? And what forms of resistance should be formulated to counteract the barbarism of these tendencies?
Environmentalist Sinéad Mercier explores the legal and moral complexities surrounding the nature of ringforts, while artist Michael Holly’s fieldwork with folklorist Eddie Lenihan reveals and analyses many sites of resonance in County Clare. In addition, extensive large format aerial imagery and historical maps licensed from Ordnance Survey Ireland detail changes over recent decades to these landscapes.
FEEDERS
The circular removal of topsoil, dug at even depths along the parameter, completes the separation between burial mound and outer world. The grave was then cut, leaving enough space for its contents. An additional platform was gouged into the earthen sides, allowing the kneeling mourners to arrange the body and lay down gifts. The surface of this formation was then fixed with a clay membrane and hazel poles were inserted to construct a dome roof. The entire rounded structure could then be sealed with earth and marked with a timber post or probe. A series of rituals were performed and feasts organised to announce its completion and celebrate the converging of two temporalities. This is an exorcise, an invocation, the possession of a barrow built in five stages.
FEEDERS is a film by Meg Hadfield, edited with Cóilín O’Connell.
Meg Hadfield (Southampton, UK, 1994) draws upon divergent poetic histories to gather and compose fictions. Her practice deals with mystical constructions of text as a material which might manifest or embody; dirt, desire and deviant literary characters. Drawing from oral traditions to invoke unspoken dialectics in contemporary platforms, she conjures poetic phenomena to be encountered and reanimated in the form of audio installation and printed matter.
Cóilín O’Connell is a mixed media artist who uses documentation, archives and publishing as a method for creating (science) fictions, garden-variety mythologies and subjective representations.