Ireland is my hearth-land

Aisling Keavey

This work in progress is concerned with female members of the Irish diaspora living in England and is engaged with representational imagery and personal testimony from the Irish community ensuring the collective response to histories of migration. The women were photographed and interviewed about their experience of being Irish in London, their reasoning for emigrating and their thoughts about what home means to them. Interview questions were concerned with traditional ethnographic qualitative interview technique, using unstructured interview and prompts. The women were also interviewed about a particular object that had some significance to them and to Ireland. The women were filmed interacting with these objects, to show the haptic engagement of the subject with the object.

Artist biography

Aisling Keavey’s practice fuses the traditional with the contemporary and is concerned with issues of personal and collective history and the Irish Diaspora. Keavey’s research themes are manifested through image-based works that aim to inform the audience. By using photography and moving image, Keavey is preoccupied with the materiality images, the process through which the image is made, and informing and subverting the audience’s perception of a work. This approach considers how the physical and material process of the mechanical focusing of a lens is used as a metaphor to relate to political history and also as a method of research.

Website
Social

Ireland is my hearth-land, Aisling Keavey

Mairead's father and neighbors before the All Ireland Hurling Final between Killkenny and Waterford, late 1950s.

Mairead's father when he was a young teacher

Laura Haynes

Laura's Irish Celtic and 32 county tattoos, symbolizing a connection to Irish culture and history

Laura Haynes This keyring was given to Laura by her brother. It is an old 20P Irish punt coin from her birth year.

Helen's uncle Tommy joined the merchant Navy and spent some time living in Kenya. This piece was brought back to Ireland from Kenya.

Helen Healy

This photograph is of Mairead's mother when she was at university in Switzerland.

Mairead's father and friend, playing hurling on the day of the All Ireland final, late 1950s.

This photograph is of Mairead's father in America.

Mairead's uncle, her father's cousin Seamus and her father.

Mairead NiCheoinin

Breda Corish

This locket made from imitation bog oak wood came from Ireland in Breda's grand aunt and grandmother's things with a lock of hair in it.

These medals were found among Breda's uncle's things who was a priest in Malta.