
Landscape as Witness - #6
Apart from working on the thesis and corresponding photobook as per usual, I also spent the past week engaging a lot more with social media through a combination of new posts and polls. As I have been relatively inactive on social media over the past few months, the online aspect of Landscape as Witness (such as the blog posts) haven't been reaching a particularly large audience as of late. Before uploading 'consistently' again, I wanted to get an idea of what sort of regular


Landscape as Witness - #5
This is just a brief update before I begin uploading more regularly to social media again. Please ignore the fact that I previously promised to post 'more frequent updates' back in March... Firstly, I have been working on my MRes thesis over the past number of months, and have now completed drafts of each chapter. I will be handing in a draft of the entire thesis at the beginning of September, with the hopes of submitting the completed body of work by the end of October. Curr


Landscape as Witness - #3
I am delighted to say that I ended up receiving the funding from IADT that enabled me to attended the Colonial and Postcolonial Landscapes international congress in Lisbon, from the 16-18th of January. Although primarily centred around architecture, the subject matter of the congress frequently overlapped with subjects that I am exploring within my own research project. It explored the likes of oral history, colonial public works, the documentation of colonial history, as wel


Landscape as Witness - #2
Long overdue, this is the 2nd instalment of a blog keeping up-to-date with my current research project, 'Landscape as Witness'. As I returned from the latest field trip at the end of August, this blog will be summarising the events that took place between September and December. The majority of work undertaken has been organising the large quantity of data that I had collected over the course of the 6-week field trip to North Clare. I maintained a blog throughout the duration


Landscape as Witness - Field Trip: Day 42
For the final day of the field trip I cycled down to Ballyvaughan once more to document the famine wall there. The weather was due to be considerably more overcast than the previous day, so I thought I would have a better chance at getting the shot that I had envisioned. Although having prepared to stop en route to pump up my front tire, I was happily surprised to find that I didn't end up having the need to do so. I locked up my bike up in the same place as before, and made


Landscape as Witness - Field Trip: Day 41
Although I have documented all of the confirmed Public Works Scheme constructions that I have discovered so far around the area, I hadn't yet photographed the famine wall in Ballyvaughan during this field trip. The only images I have of the wall were taken back at the start of 2017 as part of my undergraduate degree, meaning that the resultant images look quite different to the images I've been taking over the last number of weeks. Furthermore, I had not yet taken any video f


Landscape as Witness - Field Trip: Day 40
As heavy rain was forecast for most of the afternoon, I thought it would be best to work locally today rather than only being able to work for a couple of hours elsewhere. This meant that I had much more time to document the area around the Carron turlough than I had originally anticipated, something that I had been neglecting over the last couple of weeks. As well as photographing the area I also shot some video footage overlooking the turlough itself, managing to find a sim


Landscape as Witness - Field Trip: Days 37-39
During a recorded interview a few weeks ago I had been told of two bridges around Ballyvaughan that had been built during the famine years, or else they had undergone upgrades around that time. Originally I had thought that the bridges in question were actually the flood preventions built just south of the local church. However, upon emailing the interviewee to confirm this he informed me that one of the bridges was built next to the pier, with the other being built about 2km


Landscape as Witness - Field Trip: Day 36
There was due to be quite a lot of cloud cover around the area for most of the morning, so I took advantage of this by walking down the road to document the famine road in Poulaphuca once more. Although I had already gotten various images of the road itself, I was still eager to capture an image from another slightly higher viewpoint. As well as this, I was still yet to film any footage of the road during my time here. I certainly got the weather that I was hoping for as I le


Landscape as Witness - Field Trip: Day 35
The weather looked slightly more promising today so I made my way down to Mullach Mór once more to see what sort of images I could get of both constructions. I decided to go to the famine road first, as I had scouted out a couple of different viewpoints there yesterday. Strong winds occurred throughout most of the day, resulting in the sunny spells being interrupted quite frequently by short showers and overcast skies. Because of this a lot of time was spent finding a locatio