GATHERING RAGE ON THE BRIDGE OF TEARS [EXHIBITION TEXT]
MICHAELA CULLEN
SOUND/FILM/PERFORMANCE
25 mins
THE TETLEY
17th JULY 2019
A simple plaque in stone beside the bridge reads:
“Fad leis seo a thagadh cairde agus lucht gaoil an té a bhí ag imeacht chun na coigrithe. B’anseo an scaradh. Seo Droichead na nDeor”.
("Family and friends of the person leaving for foreign lands would come this far. Here was the separation. This is the Bridge of Tears".)
Michaela Cullen presents the first body of work that researches into ideas surrounding, ‘Planetary Anxiety’, cultivation and horticulture, wormholes and the Holocene; interdimensional travel, further grounded in longstanding interests in Irish Mythology, nature and storytelling, horror, and the working class Northern Irish familial.
A new fictional story written by the artist, follows the psychotomimetic trip of an unidentified character.
A sound work and accompanying visuals endeavour to illustrate this turbulent, violent, emotionally exhaustive metaphysical odyssey, weaving through time and interplanetary landscapes, the character is confronted with a series of continually unfolding events until eventually coming face to face with mythological Irish deity, Cailleach.
Cailleach is associated with craggy, prominent mountains and outcroppings, such as Hag's Head. Cairn T on Slieve na Calliagh is a classic passage tomb, in which the rays of the equinox sunrise shine down the passageway and illuminate an inner chamber filled with megalithic stone carvings. Until quite recently most Irish people lived within a cosmos that contained a privileged vertical dimension rather than a landscape with a horizontal one.
Place names and physical elements of the landscape are frequently associated with the death and burial of divine females who can be considered derivations of a generative female divinity. These include mountains, mounds, coastline, rivers, lakes and caves. This cosmology included the weather and the fertility of the land, which later developed into the sovereignty principle. The Cailleach is the Ancient Earth herself. She is the lichen-covered rocks and the mountain peaks. She is the bared earth covered with snow and frost. She is the Deep Ancestress, veiled by the passage of time.
Repressed feelings of the Irish diaspora (Irish: Diaspóra na nGael) are a constant source of pain and pride to many, and the raging battle of placelessness.
The persistent desire to look backwards at childhood and sentimental memory, raise questions around selective memory, and it is attempted to be challenged in this work, eeking out the, ‘bad stuff’ as much as the good.
The primary consistent aspect to Michaela Cullen’s practice is that it is built upon a foundation of theoretical research, which provides a crucial understructure to material exploration. Presently, her work explores and dismantles issues surrounding personal upbringing and identity through the study of Irish mythology; Catholicism; The Pilgrimage and Ritualism — within a contemporary and urgent feminist framework, with a specific focus on Xenofeminism. Identity is crucial in confronting these dimorphic lines of research. Often confused, frustrated and misunderstood in one’s nationality and class position, displacement and placelessness are borne, and the artist wishes to pose the question — How do we untangle what ought to be, from what is?
The utilisation of Irish mythology helps make sense of a contemporary world and offers a narrative structure to her moving image works. The idea of mythology as a literary paradigm that invokes a suspended temporality is a recurring theme within her work. By reimagining these mythological entities, I intend to reassert what they stand for in a contemporary context.
This has led to imagining Utopian futures , rather, the future is under construction.
Whether the dream brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dream.
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Michaela Cullen (Born 1991, Belfast, and lives and works in London, UK)
The importance to the plot is not the object itself...but rather its effect on the characters and their motivations...
A female dichotomy, half euphoric and psychosexual. Doesn't it feel unnatural - the turf, the soil the grit. My casual adaptation to the world that surrounds me, my own history, is on the brink of disappearing, as thin as a bubble. I feel alive when I am vocal - yet safe when I am silent. I want the Rising of a New Dawn, I want to seize technology and demand the future we deserve. Picking apart the weeds.
But a weed is simply a plant that wants to grow where people want something else. In blaming nature, people mistake the culprit..Weeds are people's ideas, not natures. The bony trees stretched over my eyes, I remembered them differently, stronger, larger in numbers. They have been cut down, as they were out of control but man - it looked sad. Should we be asking ourselves, that the time of the carefully cultivated myth of emancipation has had its time?
There should never be an end to questioning the gatekeepers.
The Lord of Nature: Master of his own social organisations lords over us as usual. I turn to the supernatural and the supernormal, in a hope to find something else, something closer. I wonder why I so vehemently denied others of their religion as a moody teenager, yet now I feel I understand somehow, even in a small way. I collect the stones up that sit by my bedside table, putting them in my pocket as I leave to catch a flight. Tomorrow may not resemble today. The Office Block disappears. The unmulched garden. I’m getting used to this private hell.
Now - narrating a world in which conventional reproduction has been replaced by post-gender multi parent genetic engineering!! Ahead. Ahead.
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CONNECTEDNESS - AN IRISH LAMENT
Who you are connected to, and what are you connected with?
By unearthing, or weeding out stories or feeling in order to gain an understanding not only of the geographical landing of my upbringing and its related ideologies but my familial background - I wonder if the combination of my epicormics growth [1] as an individual, and my near-decade away from home, has the potential to splinter feelings between myself and my mother, am I pollarding my own family tree?
After a conversation with XXXXXX recently, we discussed working with family and the possible implications, especially when working with potentially sensitive subject matter. We deliberated over issues around consent and transparency, and the pending anxiety that encroaching on a project when the very initial excitement of delving into something with a family member wears off. As the reality of the impending trip seeps in to my psyche I feel slightly frozen with worry, as in how could I ever ask such things and do I risk confrontation. The alternative to this, is they lie dormant and exhumed. Which maybe makes me sadder. Suspecting and knowing are not the same. The valorisation of the Virgin Mary ideal in Catholic and Irish communities, and the translation of my own feminist politics smash together as I attempt to approach the delicate and personal feelings of XXXXX who WILL defend her own beliefs, but could in turn deny me mine, dismissing it as my own Hypersensitive Chronicle.. In reality – I only seek to engage with both flowing streams.
The acknowledged separation – a sigh of relief. Like mother like daughter...
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THE INBETWEEN : TO FUSE REALITY WITH FICTION – OUR WORLD WITH THE FUTURE
The idea of fusing contemporary and current ideas, with a vision of the future that is only slightly out of grasp is one that creates much appetite for the impending.
Questioning or untangling what ought to be – from what is.
I want to focus on Irish mythology character Macha – she is associated with the land, fertility, kingship, war and horses. O'Mulconry's Glossary —a thirteenth-century compilation of glosses taken from medieval manuscripts and preserved in the Yellow Book of Lecan —says the term ‘Mesrad Machae’ or "The Mast of Macha", refers to "the heads of men that have been slaughtered" Macha is a dominator.
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OUT OF CLUTTER, FIND SIMPLICITY
Women’s work, emotional and physical labour including reproduction; the implications of and upbringing in the catholic faith in Ireland and its transition to spiritualism; the Irish Mythological tale and its translation to contemporary feminist ideologies or futuristic notions; a nod to the Utopian and alternative familial and societal modes. I envision these should be laced together by this pilgrimage journey, which I see as a form of cleansing ritual I will visit Knock, Co. Mayo, Ireland.
Like a dystopian novel or movie, only slightly shifted from our familiar world – they may seem, ‘off’ or skewed – not quite right. I do not set out to resolve anything, one could never be so bold! I don’t know exactly what this is going to look like and believe that this is just something that will reveal itself through its own processes. I believe it important to look ahead, whilst bringing as much as I can of the ancient past with me...
into the Rising of a New Dawn.
STILLS FROM
GATHERING RAGE ON THE BRIDGE OF TEARS'
(2019)
20 MIN 50 SEC
