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The Unseen Shows
Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2020
Mark Garry, ‘Songs and the Soil’ 2020, installation view, The MAC; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy of the artist and The MAC, Belfast
Songs and the Soil JOANNE LAWS SPEAKS TO MARK GARRY ABOUT HIS RECENT SOLO EXHIBITION AT THE MAC IN BELFAST.
Joanne Laws: Can you describe some of the artistic inquiries underpinning ‘Songs and the Soil’ at The MAC (30 January – 19 April)? Mark Garry: I suppose it’s similar to all of my exhibitions in that I’m trying to find a way to activate architectural space, while also negotiating social and associative space. This show was quite specific in that it looked at two particular entities that I see as being inter-reliant or interconnected: the concept of landscape – as a pictorial space, geographic space and social space – and the idea of music, or more specifically song, where song acts as a mechanism to speak about social situation. I’m also interested in the idea of song as a form of ritual celebration, to confirm common bonds. ‘Songs and the Soil’ engaged those two elements and the spaces where they intersect. JL: Maybe you could discuss your new film work, which I believe adopts the theatrical structure of a Greek Tragedy? MG: An Lucht Siúil, which translates from Irish as The Walking People, looks at the relationship between Irish travellers and the Irish state at the beginning of the last century. I undertook an intensive period researching these socially-constructed restrictions upon Irish travellers and how, politically, that impacted the relationship between settled people and traveller people, especially settled people from the countryside whose relationship with travellers as migrant workers and craftspeople was a crucial characteristic of rural economies. I shot the film with Padraig Cunningham, who is a friend and now quite a persistent collaborator. The film looks at the concept of tragedy – in particular, complex tragedy, as something that doesn’t have a simplistic ending and is made up of complications that persist. Some of it is romantic and nostalgic, enabling a poetic space to speak about a social situation, while some of it is very much rooted in reality. All the songs were translated into the language of the Irish Traveller: de Gamon or Cant, which linguists would refer to as Shelta. It is half sung and half spoken (in both English and Shelta) to acknowledge the role of
