Landscape Liminality Lament
My research project (PhD) is concerned with exploring a site. The site is heterotopic and liminal; it is an in-between place and it exists on the marginal edge of a border territory. This site has become a provocation for personal revelation and ontological questioning; this site is known as the Gap of the North.
The Gap of the North is a specific border area between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and is situated with in the naturally occurring geological formation of mountains and hills; this gap became a precursor of much contention throughout the history of the island.
The landscape in and around the Gap of the North, near the Hill of Faughart, belies an area, that for some, is a retreat, a safe haven. Secretive, untouchable and mythical, it is also referred to as a lawless place of danger and has evocatively been given the ascription ‘bandit country’ (Harnden, 2000). The area has been referred to as being both geographically and socially liminal and understood as a place of hybridity and instability (Nash, Graham and Reid, 2016). Steeped in history and trauma, the political, physical landscape of the area was active, bloody and turbulent. Strangeness and fear exude from the political human horror and mythological endeavours that are entwined in the fabric of the area, in the layers of colonial history and in the evidence of a once highly militarised panoptical zone, by a dominant discourse of occupation, control and surveillance.
Introduction to the Project
The research explores ways of thinking about the Irish border and the development of visual, and textual research in response to place and landscape. The project has extended and developed from a close personal engagement and relationship with the area, and has derived from resonate subjective and objective perspectives regarding Landscapes capacity to disrupt and reassure.
Engagement with established paradigms of landscape study and an ‘evolving’ immanent conceptual framework, have, and will assist in the complex analysis of the site and its subsequent affective, temporal and political resonances. Historically, a site of contestation, the research questions whose knowledge is valued and represented, thus becoming a space where dominant discourses are challenged and disrupted.
Practice and research address notions of loss, trauma, memory and diaspora; histories and entanglements with home & place, and are used to assist in constructing a neo-narrative that draws on a variety of voices, including both personal narrative (subjective voice/voices) and critical engagement.
©anncarragher2018
The Gap of the North is a specific border area between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and is situated with in the naturally occurring geological formation of mountains and hills; this gap became a precursor of much contention throughout the history of the island.
The landscape in and around the Gap of the North, near the Hill of Faughart, belies an area, that for some, is a retreat, a safe haven. Secretive, untouchable and mythical, it is also referred to as a lawless place of danger and has evocatively been given the ascription ‘bandit country’ (Harnden, 2000). The area has been referred to as being both geographically and socially liminal and understood as a place of hybridity and instability (Nash, Graham and Reid, 2016). Steeped in history and trauma, the political, physical landscape of the area was active, bloody and turbulent. Strangeness and fear exude from the political human horror and mythological endeavours that are entwined in the fabric of the area, in the layers of colonial history and in the evidence of a once highly militarised panoptical zone, by a dominant discourse of occupation, control and surveillance.
Introduction to the Project
The research explores ways of thinking about the Irish border and the development of visual, and textual research in response to place and landscape. The project has extended and developed from a close personal engagement and relationship with the area, and has derived from resonate subjective and objective perspectives regarding Landscapes capacity to disrupt and reassure.
Engagement with established paradigms of landscape study and an ‘evolving’ immanent conceptual framework, have, and will assist in the complex analysis of the site and its subsequent affective, temporal and political resonances. Historically, a site of contestation, the research questions whose knowledge is valued and represented, thus becoming a space where dominant discourses are challenged and disrupted.
Practice and research address notions of loss, trauma, memory and diaspora; histories and entanglements with home & place, and are used to assist in constructing a neo-narrative that draws on a variety of voices, including both personal narrative (subjective voice/voices) and critical engagement.
©anncarragher2018
