Beneath Bloody Foreland, a Glasgow artist in her mother’s homeplace

A residency with the University of Galway gave Glasgow artist Christina McBride an opportunity to explore the natural and built environment of her mother’s homeplace in Gaoth Dobhair, County Donegal, in a series of analogue images and fibre-based prints. Her Críocha an Chroí / Heartland opens in An Gailearaí, Páirc Ghnó Ghaoth Dobhair, on 7 July. Here, in (Greim Dúchais) / (Placehold), writer Sara O’Brien responds to McBride’s work.

Light leaks out and the land seeps in where elements have been collected to yield an image. Images that have been bathed in alchemical distillations so that this place can disclose itself to us. We seek modes of inhabitation and so we court language because that, after all, is a means of composing imagery too.

We dwell to come to know. We rustle through memories, not only to return but to retain. These residues are vital. We draw succour from that which came before us and we layer these remnants, like strata, one upon another and the next.

We piece together our pasts to situate ourselves, which might be why the fragmentary can feel so fruitful. It lets us in. The artist can do this too, providing images as temporary enclosures and protective mechanisms that bestow brief veils of permanence on what might otherwise be lost.

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These processes are tender and intimate but volatile too, with the shifting and the sifting between what is and what was. But images are not only reflections of the seen. They are refracted by vantage points of affiliation and, here, they are literally infused with the produce of the place.

Sarah gathered moss from the edge. Sally before her. Nellie next. Each brings the other with her and, with this, carries something of before. Christina follows, making samples and finding in terrain that has historically been deemed inhospitable a space that can host these histories.

She draws from the land, knowing that not all lines are explicit and that our connections are often tentative and tentacular. Moments repeat themselves and we learn that lineage is circular and reverberant. There is resilience in these archives of ancestry. All is made with what was and will go back to where it began.

Dislodged from the mountain, debris tells of passing time. The precision of balance hints at the stubborn persistence of instability. Everything is wont to change and it is perhaps from this inevitability that the archival impulse stems. It is for this that we assemble. That and the feeling that it has been waiting here all along.

From an ever-increasing preponderance of images and in a world drenched with stimuli comes a desire to qualify some of these instances differently. We find that an image can be a moment at rest. So we seek to negotiate its intentions and origins. We look for frames that can facilitate affinities.

Críocha an Chroí / Heartland is attuned to the nuance of these landscapes and the particular pronunciations of their protrusions. The work then comes to unfold under this dual title where each term props open the meanings conjured by the other, stirring up fresh resonances. It may not settle simply but it illuminates the fecundity of an uneasy pairing and the many ways one thing can be said and thus given sense. For language can be restless and uncooperative but, like the light, it always finds somewhere and somehow to land.

Christina McBride is a visual artist attached to the Glasgow School of Art. Her residency in Gaoth Dobhair was made possible by the University of Galway, Ealaín na Gaeltachta, Údarás na Gaeltachta, and the Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny. Sara O’Brien is a writer based between Dublin and Glasgow. She recently graduated from the MLitt Art Writing at Glasgow School of Art, where she was awarded The Yellow Paper Prize for Art Writing 2021 and the Foulis Medal 2021 for outstanding postgraduate student.