I spent a lot of time during my first weeks on Cléire walking, exploring, photographing, drawing, thinking, reading, improving my Irish. I was born elsewhere, with a different language; I grew up in a different elsewhere, with another different language…perhaps everywhere is elsewhere seen from the perspective of this small island; on the Atlantic fringe of Europe, moored in Roaringwater Bay; portal and frontier, exposed bluff, steep humpbacked whale, three square miles of old red sandstone, lush vegetation and centuries of human habitation…

I knew I wanted to make sculptural work that came from the land and was rooted in the land, incorporating a source text in Irish. I didn’t know what it would say and I didn’t know how it would be made.

I had been hoping to work with some of the older residents of the island - hearing their stories and perhaps finding some treasure - a story, memory, song or poem. Covid restrictions meant I had to rethink what I was doing - and look elsewhere for my source material and my source text.

I rethought, I walked the island’s many routes, paths and explored many hidden spots. I made drawings at points I was drawn to, where I was drawn in.

I carried on learning Irish - in the house, through daily chats and Whatsapps with Brigid, Vicky, Ruairí and MáirtIn, through online courses and resources - and through our weekly ‘Hedge School’ sessions with Séamus - in the garden, around the fire and on kayaks in the South Harbour.

The ongoing Covid crisis developed while we were on the residency, with the introduction of Level 5 restrictions nationwide, meaning we had to get creative about how to interact more widely with the island community. One positive outcome of this was that Brigid, Vicky and myself developed our collaborative Zine project. We were already a close unit, forming a temporary household support bubble, eating, walking, swimming together, sharing books, music, laughs and knowledge gained from our individual explorations. We took advantage of the upcoming Samhain/ Hallowe’en to produce our collaborative Samhain Chléire Zine, and this was a real highlight for me. I’ve always enjoyed collaborative practice and the three of us working together, with Ruairí, and supported by Máirtín and the Comharchumann, seemed to develop a natural synergy, drawing on our different practices, skills and range of experiences to produce the Zine - a small bilingual art book of which we were all very proud, and which we delivered to every household across the island in a Covid-safe delivery model on the morning of 31st October.

Coming back to my own work, I borrowed old children’s books as Gaeilge from the lovely little Leabharlann Chléire and studied the typographic design of their Cló Gaelach letterforms. I improved my Irish a little each day, adding to my store of words and gaining new understandings through songs and poems, folklore and children’s stories, drawn to the placenames and the historical material I found in books, in the Heritage Centre, and on duchas.ie.

I experimented with sculptural form, material and location - with found driftwood, rusted bits of old boat, the sand of the strand, the old stone steps of the quay - until I settled on the very stuff of the island, the old Devonian Red Sandstone that splits satisfyingly into vertical strata and is visible everywhere along the rocky shoreline.

This is how my process settled into the work that would become: An Leabharlann na gClocha Ceilte / The Hidden Stone Library’ A durational work in several stages, consisting of a number of inter-related actions:

Exploration > exctraction > translation > typographic design > incision > incavation.

The library comprises a number of initial ‘titles’. Each title is a tablet, made of natural stone slabs, carefully selected and delicately extracted from a significant location from the interdidal zone of the island’s foreshore. I carved text onto the tablets by hand, basing my letterforms on the Cló Gaelach script from the original carved name-stone of the island’s Scóil Náisiúnta.

Lettercutting in stone is a slow process, painstaking, deliberate. It requires forethought, care, attention to detail and precision. It requires sensitivity to language, to material, to matter, to matters of the heart, and mind, and hand, and land; to generations of accumulation and accretion - of stories, of lives…

So I found myself, chipping away, incising myself, a conduit between old and new, a place between here and there, between then and now, idir Bearla agus Gaeilge, fé gheasaibh draoidheachta…

‘An Leabharlann na gClocha Ceilte / The Hidden Stone Library’ contains the following titles so far:

Title 1) ‘Inis dhom / Inis Cléire’

Title 2) ‘You Can See / Clear Through Me’

Title 3) ‘Ní rabhas ach seal / It was only a matter of time’ (part one).

Part one of ‘Ní rabhas ach seal’ comprises four tablets, each carved with a single line from an untitled poem (author unknown) sourced from the duchas.ie national folklore archive.

Title 3a) ‘Ní rabhas ach seal ar an gcaladh im’ aonar’

Title 3b) ‘Nuair a mheasas mé féin fé gheasaibh draoidheachta’

Title 3c) ‘Nuair cualadh mé gutha mar ceol Orphéus’

Title 3d) ‘Sa teanga Ghaedhilge bhlasda bhinn’

The process of identifying and then interpreting the text, in all its multifaceted history, is an ongoing one, and I really enjoyed the linguistic detective work involved in understanding its provenance and particular use of Irish. I’m grateful to Brigid for a thought-provoking discussion about historical texts, and am also grateful to Diarmuid Ó Drisceóil for his help with translation and understanding the particularities of the text. I am working on part two (the next four lines) in my County Galway studio over the winter months, and will return to Oileán Chléire during 2021 to complete this title and accession it in the Hidden Stone Library - by installing it in a special island location - to be confirmed - in a ritual ‘incavation’ ceremony.

Reflecting on my time on Oileán Chléire, I feel it opened up new ways of working for me, and allowed me to hone ideas I’d been exploring previously, pointing some new ways forward. Through making ‘An Leabharlann na gClocha Celite’ I’ve deepened my thinking around how to materialise language through sculpture, and how this process could engage with place and community - in a way that could reveal valuable insights, obscure aspects of past cultural knowledge. This is one aspect of my ongoing research as part of my practice-led PhD, and my time spent on Cléíre has made a significant contribution to this research.

My challenge with this work, especially ‘Ní Rabhas Ach Seal’ is to complete it, return it to the island and embed it in the collective knowledge of Cléíre. Over this strangest of winters, I’m working on the next titles in the series and looking forward to my return to the island.

Main title photograph plus Carousel photographs: Gabriel Bethencourt.

All other photographs: Noah Rose.