Stone and Salt Water (2022)

Stone and Salt Water focusses on my own community, the small town of Passage West. The town was once the port for Cork, a nexus for transportation of goods and people and a center for shipbuilding and repair. Deindustrialization in the mid 20th century resulted the closing of the dockyard and the railway, and the town stagnated during the lean decades of the 1950s – 1980s when economic hardship, unemployment and emigration affected much of Ireland. The last twenty-five years have seen its revival as a satellite town for the growing IT and pharmaceutical industries in Cork city and nearby Ringaskiddy. It is now a town in transition, where the physical reminders of its industrial past sit alongside new housing estates and amenities that burgeoned during the economic boom of the ‘Celtic Tiger’. There has been an influx of new and relatively affluent residents. Redevelopment of many of the sites associated with its maritime and industrial past to new residential, commercial and leisure builds are planned.

I was curious about what life was like for those who grew up here in the latter half of the 20th century, when the town’s industrial past had come to an end and when many faced unemployment or emigration in the future. What was it like to belong to this community, and what were the things that contributed to that sense of belonging? How were the changes in the town affecting that sense of belonging?

I began to collaborate with members of the community who had grown up in Passage West during those years. Meeting with members of The Passage West Men's Shed as a group, and using archival photographs of the town as a catalyst for their reminiscences, I recorded their conversations, and their accounts informed my image making for this project.

Stone and Salt Water explores how nostalgic reminiscences, activated by photographs, may affirm our sense of belonging to a place, and sustain place attachment when that place is changing. ‘Belonging’, a sense of ease that a person has with themselves in their surroundings, is anchored not just in place but in time. Remembering what connects us to a place reaffirms that sense of belonging, providing continuity when a place is rapidly changing. The images in this work examine the layers of time – history, personal memory, and the present – that exist in our surroundings. They depict locations that are not just the physical reminders of a past that will never return. For those who grew up here they are also locations which activate significant personal memories related to how they formed, and maintain, their place identity. The images invite the viewer to access their own reverie and to reflect upon their own place attachment. At a less explicit level, the work invites discourse about the sanitizing/neutralizing impact on place attachment of regeneration projects and the possible consequent ‘gentrification’ of historically working class communities.

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