The Banshee
The Banshee (2022-24) is deeply personal work. It is a longing for my Irish family and the landscapes that are at a distance removed. The longing intensified following the death of my mother shortly before the pandemic. Although I reside in London and have never lived in Ireland, I am a regular visitor and have maintained strong connections to my maternal Irish heritage since childhood. It feels like my true home. During this period of grief, I defined my sense of self by emotions. During my first return to Ireland post-lockdown, I started a new piece of work. And so began The Banshee, an intense pull to reconnect with place; the small coastal village of Banna, where generations of my family are located. I wanted to experience the landscape where my mother started her journey, to excavate memories from my childhood, to revisit spaces that bind me to my family and to Banna – a place that has become my second home. I wanted to be in the presence of people who understood my grief and my history.
The landscape is peppered with Marram 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, having immigrated in her teenage years after joining a convent.
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 that was dictated by her illness. The objects she collected and paperwork she saved were totems of her own purpose and identity, an effort to understand what her story meant. 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. This work is a homecoming for me. It is also a search for hidden aspects of my mums history and her journey from her family home, to becoming a nun at the young age of 16, immigrating to the UK and becoming a mother later in life. It is collaborations with family that invite a complexity of emotions. What is created is imagined as valuable, quiet and delicate, a fused bond between kin and place.