Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty
A Collection of Disarticulated Bones is a new body of video work, photographs and objects made and combined for TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, curated by Michele Horrigan.
This long-term project traverses centres of knowledge in the US, UK and Europe in order to unpick different foundation myths of the Global North: institutional, pop cultural and embodied. A Collection of Disarticulated Bones examines how decisions relating to preservation and presentation of histories can shape national and individual identities, in the context of imperialism, late capitalism, rising ethnonationalism and polarised public debate on both sides of the Atlantic.
This research is supported by Askeaton Contemporary Arts, the Centre for Creative Technologies at University of Galway, Galway Culture Company, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, Creative Heartlands, Galway City Museum and the Arts Council of Ireland. In 2024, A Collection of Disarticulated Bones toured to Solas Nua, Washington D.C. and The New Music + Technology Festival at the Moss Arts Centre (Virginia Technical University).
Three short documentary-style films feature speakers from the north and west of Ireland, all sharing stories of community action, collective vision and the struggle to authentically remember and commemorate traumatic events.
Forty-five Seconds (HD video, 10’54”)
On 31 March 1993, two gardaí were driving around on late-night patrol in a small west of Ireland town when they witnessed strange lights in the sky above them. At the time, their story was taken seriously, given their social standing, and was reported in Irish media. Now retired from the force, and driving luxury vintage cars for weddings, one of the Gardaí tells his story while driving the artists to the location of the sighting.
This work reflects on how stories are told and the impact of American culture on the popular imagination in Ireland. Touching on tourism, alien invasion, bird migration and military aviation, it hints towards the fear subconsciously felt by some in the Global North that a technologically advanced alien society could come and steal land and resources, mimicking historical colonial expansion.
Part of the People (HD video, 9’50”)
The Old Library in Trinity College Dublin is, for the first time in its 300-year history, empty of books. This
is in order to facilitate refurbishment designed to protect the collection from environmental hazards, particularly dust. Visited last year by nearly 780,000 people, the collection is at risk from particulate matter caused by increased tourist numbers as well as motor traffic, building deterioration, and dust from
the leather binding of the books themselves.
In 1890, thirteen human skulls were stolen from Inisbofin, an island off the west coast of Ireland, by Trinity College researchers engaged in the discredited Victorian practice of craniometry, or skull measuring. After a long campaign by islanders, the skulls were returned and interred on the island in 2023, potentially setting a precedent for the return of other controversial artefacts in the college collection.
Brick by Brick (HD video, 12’17”)
The Ulster American Folk Park is an open air museum in Co. Tyrone which uses reconstructed Irish and American buildings, interpreted by live costumed guides, to tell the story of historical Ulster migration to rural America. One dwelling in the museum’s collection stands out from the others: a large red brick house built in 1825 in Tennessee by Francis Rogan, an Irish American Catholic plantation owner and enslaver. The museum acquired the house in the 1990s and had it dismantled and shipped across the Atlantic, each brick carefully numbered. During reconstruction, conservators discovered some bricks that held imperfections: marks left by people present when the clay bricks were drying outside. Those bricks were carefully removed for further study and preservation. One bore a handprint, and the other a bare footprint, likely belonging to a child approximately seven or eight years old who lived on the plantation two centuries ago. As the Rogan family had no children of their own at that time, it is plausible to suggest that the marks were left by an enslaved child.
We imagine these imprints as stowaways. Once hidden within the walls of this house, they have travelled across land and water to reveal themselves in present-day Ireland. The moulds, now museum artefacts, represent the connection between ourselves, our diaspora and the legacies of institutional racism that continue to afflict society. Narrated by Curator of Emigration, Liam Corry, the video is structured as a palindrome with repetitive shots of anonymous bricks building and unbuilding. We are interested in the moment of transformation: when the house is not a house but a hoard of objects, suspended in space. We picture these bricks unfurling, spinning in a great circle and coagulating again as an image of a house, rebuilt in each moment of encounter.
