Beacon
head > land took
place at Fort Dunree from dusk to dark, beginning with a
live vocal performance by members of Simply Music on the
headland, facing the lough and open sea and culminating
in the switching on of the WWI searchlight facing out across
the Swilly.
The Beacon
exhibition was very effectively sited in an old military
hospital ward with the wind beating outside on this exposed
site looking out onto the Atlantic. Panels by archaeologist
John Cronin provided a historical context for the contemporary
work, discussing the use of the site as a military base
by both the British and the Irish.
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Harry
Kerr: Wind (sphere), black-and-white photograph;
courtesy the artist
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Sutherland's
work Fathom (made with Foyle Search and Rescue)
is a video loop and four colour transparencies in lightboxes.
The lightbox images offer an unsettlingly simple view
of what seem to be wayside grasses and tiny wildflowers.
A sinister and disturbing edge is given to the potentially
picturesque. Bullrushes are just visible in one image,
concrete bridge supports in another; no water appears
but we are searching its banks. Also by Sutherland,
Rose spirit star, a triptych of photographic images,
reflects the artist's fascination with the human urge
to order, control or to make familiar the land and sea.
This most recent work has the appearance of signposts;
the rich colour images are long and narrow, mounted on
thick wood becoming almost sculptural. The naming offers
not identification of the boat but identification with
the boat, ownership of the 'spiritual vessel'.
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Mhairi
Sutherland: Spiritual vessel, colour photograph;
courtesy the artist
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McCulloch
and Kerr's work touches on the balance between beautification
and truth-telling. In a series of paired images, taken
in Inishowen, Martha McCulloch's photographs invite us
to reflect on the gap between the experience of being
in the landscape and the image promised by tourism literature.
The dramatic and brooding seascapes, expanses of beach
and rocky headland or the perfectly detailed lichen on
silvery grey rocks all contrast with the blunt concrete
and rotting wood seat from which we are invited to look
at the 'view'. 'Viewing' is presented as an emotionally
bleak and distanced experience of landscape. Harry Kerr's
beautiful tiny prints are jewels - made with a cheap plastic
Diana camera. With their rich dark fogged edges and creamy
plum-and-ivory tones they transform the landscape into
brooding poetic visions - glimpses of place and a moment
experienced. In these photographs the landscape is inescapably
an object of imagination.
Dr Amanda
McKittrick is an artist based in Belfast, individual
recipient of a major Engaging Science People Award from
the Wellcome Trust, and honorary research fellow in the
Anatomy Department, School of Medicine at Queen's University,
Belfast.
Beacon
head > land, Fort
Dunree; this event was organised by artlink for
the Festival of the Peninsula in Inishowen, 2003
