Beyond the pale Australia: the studio as site where notions of Irish national identity are translated into contemporary works of art

This exegesis and studio praxis convenes within an Irish contemporary art framework to translate an embodied experience of being an Irish woman living in Australia. As a constituent of the Irish diaspora, my research evokes the sentiments of Irish artist Katy Deepwell, whose remarks about Irishness are echoed in the exegesis that accompanies the works of art: ‘our displacement, our living all over the world, our history of emigration, our psyche’. The impulse of the research is not to fashion sentimentality of a homeland but to examine the physical and psychological distances between the two countries through a personal and critical response to Irish national identity. The conceptual premise of this research analyses the West of Ireland’s position as the enduring site for Irish national identity. The research proposes that this model of identity, constructed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lingers in the Irish psyche as the sacred home of Irish national identity. Given the premise of where ‘Irishness’ is seen to be located in the heartland of the West of Ireland, then my position of ‘coming’ from the East presents as a form of otherness or as an alternative way of ‘being’ Irish. In a landscape of ‘Saints and Scholars’ this dichotomy causes tension in relation to belonging and raises questions on the formation of a national identity. To this end, the West of Ireland plays a fundamental role as a place for a self-reflective journey, where the experience of diaspora as it relates to Irish national identity is explored and recorded. The studio-based art practice as research manifests through a series of material conversations to present a discourse that reflects and draws upon Irish and Irish Australian nationalist histories and nationalist ideologies.