Tír Breac / Speckled Land — Anna Macleod
Tír Breac / Speckled Land is the latest iteration of an ongoing project that considers our human relationship to nature and place through ‘speckled ways of seeing’, defined as a Celtic perceptual attentiveness to the seen, heard, and felt granular details of a place. ‘Speckled ways of seeing’ implicates the lens of indigenous knowledge passed down through oral histories and ritual landscapes, which this work combines with organic materials and heritage craft practices to critique modern knowledge of land and nature.
The Gaelic culture of Ireland and Scotland sought to understand nature, through the solar and lunar cosmologies of the Neolithic standing stone and henge sites, and by mapping the mysteries of place through the Dindsenchas and other epic mythological cycles. Tír Breac refers to these ancient cosmologies through its attention to the calendrical festivals that mark the changing seasons in the agricultural cycle: Samhain, Imbolc, Bealtaine, and Lughnasadh. Speckled ways of seeing involve an intimate understanding of the land through the seasons, as light, pattern, and colour constantly shift by the minute, the hour, and the season.
Moreover, speckled ways of seeing entail a sensitivity to a world inhabited by Others. In Celtic folklore and mythology, flora and fauna have shapeshifting qualities. A salmon can give wisdom to the person who eats its flesh. The wind has colours. The bark, fruit, and leaves of trees can heal or harm. Gods and goddesses rule the light and the dark. These other-than-human entities can appear in liminal spaces and the thresholds of seasons.
This series of works explores speckled seeing by employing organic materials and heritage land practices to ‘trouble’ contemporary understanding of nature. The following materials were predominantly sourced in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland and the Northwest of Ireland: hay and straw, found bog oak, hawthorn from fallen lone trees (hUath / Sceath Gheal), and blackthorn wood (Draighneán Donn) thinned from the hedgerow. Research has drawn extensively on archives and artifacts in local and national museums in Ireland and Scotland. Groundwork also included time spent with local historians, musicians, storytellers, crofters, and Harris tweed weavers, as well as with Leitrim farmer, storyteller, and writer Gerry Bohan, with whom the artist has an ongoing working partnership.
Events
7 March: Opening reception with performance by Pádraig McGovern, 2 — 4pm. No booking required.
21 March: Guided tour with Anna Macleod, 11am — 12pm. No booking required.
25 April: Anna Macleod and Gerry Bohan in conversation with Mary Conlon, 11am — 12pm. Booking required. Book your free ticket here
16 May: Uisce Sionainn / Flora Liatromensis, performative walking event, 11am — 1pm. Booking required. Book your free ticket here