The Banshee

The Banshee is a deeply personal work, a longing for my Irish family & the landscapes that are at a distance removed. My feelings intensified following the death of my mother Dec 2019. I'm seeking to trace & reconstruct memory through this ongoing project

The Banshee is deeply personal work. It is a longing for my Irish family and the landscapes that are at a distance removed. My feelings intensified following the death of my mother shortly before the pandemic. Though I reside in London and have never lived in Ireland, since childhood I have been a visited family constantly and have maintained strong connections to my maternal Irish heritage. During this period of grief, I defined my sense of place by emotions. Marking my first return to Ireland post-lockdown to be with family, I started a new piece of work to reach into these feelings.

I experienced an intense pull to reconnect with this place, which feels like our place; the small coastal village of Banna, where generations of my family began their lives.I wanted to experience the landscapes where my mother started her journey, to excavate memories from my childhood, to revisit spaces that bind me to my family and have become my second home. I wanted to be in the presence of people who understood my grief and history.

The landscape is peppered with sea grasses and bullrushes growing in the boggy land. Bullrushes also grew in front of my Nana’s house. The Irish name for bullrushes is Coigeal na mban sí, which translates as ‘spindle of the banshee’. Irish Folklore tells us a banshee is ‘a female spirit who heralds the death of a family member’. My mother died in December 2019 after many years of struggling with Alzheimer’s. She had grown up in Ireland and lived most of her life in the UK, where she gave birth to me.

 This project is, in part, a conversation with my mum across time. Much was lost, but we gained new elements of connection through constantly shifting forms of communication during her illness. The objects she collected and paperwork she saved were totems of purpose and identity. Now, I seek to find her in her writing, in what she left behind, in others and in the land.

I reach to trace and reconstruct memory through imagery and fragments of information and self-expression she left behind. This work is a homecoming for me. It is collaborations with family that invite a complexity of emotions.  What is created is rendered as valuable, quiet and delicate, a fused bond between kin and place.

The Banshee is ongoing. Currently, I'm starting to delve further into my mum's archive materials and photos, writing letters to her in response to the scraps of stories I'm finding.