Memory Is My Homeland at Rathfarnham Castle room 3: The Dining Room

 The third room of my exhibition at Rathfarnham Castle is accessed by walking across the back of The Saloon from The Pistol Loop Room and entering through the curved door. To see works related to this exhibition and in-progress, simply do a search for Memory Is My Homeland on this blog.

While it is furthest from the door that one has just entered, Kingswood is the largest piece in this room and being so colourful one tends to walk over to it first. 

This is my representation of the house in Toronto that I grew up in, the three figures representing moments of my life: a young child stands on the front lawn by the hedge on her Communion Day, wearing the purple cape that her mother made for this occasion, a young teen reading and tanning on the steps (every summer for several years) and the young woman in her early 20s leaving home to start her life as an artist and writer. The house had much flora in the front yard, back yard and side garden. One of the lilac trees in the back yard was hit by lightning when I was a child so there was a stump that didn't flower, but the other side of the tree remained healthy. I didn't put everything in the picture but as much as I could... 

Moving away from the big picture, on a false wall of its own is Home. Although this piece is much earlier than the others (it was created in 2009) and began as part of another series of works, I thought it belonged with these works. The little icon is based on a drawing my child did, of my current home in Bray, when my child was about 6 years old.

Turning away from Kingswood and Home, one is attracted by the bay windows and the plasterwork on the ceiling. There are two false walls in niches to either side of the bay windows and these contain the last pieces in the exhibition.

The House with the Red Door and The House with the Green Door are representations of the earliest homes of my life, in Cabbagetown, in Toronto's inner city. I actually remember a few things related to each house but mostly I differentiate them by the colour of their door. We moved from the former to the latter when I was 2 years old and my family moved from the latter when I was 4. The print Swing Chain, in the Pistol Loop Room, specifically relates to the low chain fencing separating the front lawn of The House with the Red Door from the footpath. I had remembered swinging on a chain fence as a toddler and thought this was a false and impossible memory until one day, as an adult, I passed this terrace of city housing while on the streetcar in Toronto and saw the low chain fences as they appeared in my memory! Cabbagetown got its name because in the late 1950s and early 1960s there was a huge wave of Irish immigrants who ended up living in this area (my parents and siblings among them).

The final piece in the show, Kingston Road: Waiting, is a representation of me in my twenties at my bachelor apartment in the upper beaches area of Toronto (West Scarborough), where I lived for several years. The curtains behind me are actual sheers that I had painted for an installation about HOME that I worked on while completing on my BFA at York University. I was, of course, waiting for my career and life to really begin. A few years after finishing uni, I moved to Ireland, where I had my first solo exhibition in Dublin at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios in the spring of 1989.

Home Project continues...

I've done some more work on the "Home" project. The "House with the Green Door" was the second house I lived in. My family moved there when I was two and we left when I was four but I still have quite a lot of memories from that place! As I mentioned last week, this house was across the road from St Martin's, the school that my older siblings went to. I specifically remember playing in the schoolyard one day, it must have been on the weekend, and I had to climb over a tree that had fallen in the storm the night before (perhaps it was hit by lightning?); I got a splinter in one of my fingers from the tree bark and ran home crying.

With the help of google streetview, I did sketches of all the places (including apartment buildings) but for now I will skip those sketches and jump ahead to my emigration to Ireland in 1988! My parents had already returned "home" five years previously, so were well ensconced. At that time I was still dithering about where I wanted to be, but I lived with my parents in the middle of Bray town on and off for about 2 years.

Then I moved back to Ireland at the end of 1993 with my partner (now my husband). We moved down to rural Kerry in early 1994 and the house we rented, beside a small humpback bridge in a small village, was a renovated traditional cottage. We lived there nearly a year and a half.

Loathe to leave the beautiful Kerry, we found a farmouse to rent near Portmagee. I couldn't sketch it from google streetview as it is not visible from the road! I found this photograph of myself and my husband in the field in front of our yellow farmhouse. The summer of 1995 was a glorious one, and I recall having regular swims in Portmagee Channel (the water and Valentia Island can be seen in the distance. We simply had to go for a walk in the field behind our house and we were upon our own private beachfront.

After my Dad died in September 1995, my husband and I were travelling frequently between Bray and Kerry. It was an exhausting drive in an old banger that could not accelerate to pass rural traffic. We moved back to Bray in the fall of 1996 to a house that was available just a few doors away from my Mum. Being part of the same terrace, this house mirrored my Mum's house, though it didn't have the renovations that my Dad had completed. We lived in this house for a good few years, until our daughter was born in 2002 and we moved to the edge of town - where we have been since!