Photo credits: Mark Bolland, Jim Mansfield & Patricia McKenna

True North

Just as True North is point of constant reference for geographers and navigators to find their bearings, this work is about a journey both personal and cultural in finding my bearings.

Patricia McKenna 2005

Patricia McKenna teases out her ideas.  She hones them, working them as she does the fragmented shards of domestic crystal that are part of the material of her new work titled, True North, a continuation of the series, Marking the Land.  Ireland is shaped by the sea, and our cultural identity is moulded by memories rooted in history, stories and myths and by our perception of ourselves as an island nation. 

McKenna is interested in how memory is formed, paradoxically not so much by what we remember, as by the things we have forgotten,  These forgotten things remain deep in our psyche and have to be returned to, re-touched, re-membered, so that the accepted mores of history and myth, personal and collective, can be challenged or at the very least reappraised.  Nothing is taken for granted.  McKenna’s diminutive porcelain islands float, isolated, on a sea of broken glass.  Drawing, in acrylic and watercolour, of elusive map-like shapes and patterns suggest forgotten places. 

Her explorations take the form of a journey (recorded on video) through space and time where names such as Hallstatt, Zavist and La Tene come into view.  She has visited these Celtic sites in order to make real physical connections and to make interventions in places that otherwise have become little more than a part of myth and museum culture.  Through her interventions, or what could be termed, acts of identification, McKenna seeks to uncover traces that elude the containment of oft-told stories and myths, the practiced narrative.  She makes room for these forgotten traces so that new images appear, that stimulate new connections and associations.  It is as though remembrance and forgetfulness are juggled and resettle a different way. 

Her interventions, which she has documented, involved floating small objects made of salt dough and icing sugar on the Celtic votive lakes of Hallstatt and La Tene.  The power and economy of Hallstatt was built on its salt mines and attracted a migrant workforce that followed the trade routes.  Migrancy continues today, both vitual and real and can engender a feeling of dislocation, but it also opens up new possibilities and challenges the notion of identity as being fixed or pre-ordained.  The focus of McKenna’s work is the view that culture is constantly evolving , is being renewed and can never remain the same.

There is a sense in the Marking the Land series that McKenna acknowledges social, cultural and political structures in order to deconstruct them, to recover herself, to open up new possibilities, draw new maps. Soil, The Grey House and her first work in the series, Echoes of Swanlinbar & Drumbar raise questions related to the fixity of identity imposed by borders, political polarities, family and social tradition.  True North pushes beyond the boundaries both physical and cultural and reflects on the relationship between place and culture.  The sea of broken glass indicates the difficulties involved, both for those arriving at or even returning to our shores and for those attempting change or departure.

Ruth Devine
Extract from the True North exhibition catalogue 2005