Rural Mythologies

SHANE FINAN DISCUSSES SOME OF HIS RECENT SITE-RESPONSIVE PROJECTS.

THOSE WHO AREN’T familiar with the area could be forgiven for mistaking this for a natural landscape. The waves lapping on a sandy shore, the wading birds, and the twisted barks of Scots pine growing along the banks all imply wildness. But this is not a wild space. Poulaphouca Reservoir in west Wicklow was flooded in the 1930s to provide electricity and drinking water to Dublin and the surrounding areas. The flooding led to evacuations of humans and nonhumans, changed the topology of the landscape irrevocably, provided a new recreation site for local people, destroyed habitats for many land-based critters and created habitats for many water-based critters. It is simultaneously a technology-led act of transformation, violence, and storytelling.

In 2018, I began walking the shores of the reservoir almost daily, as I lived near some of its more secluded parts. Its banks betray erosion unlike a normal lake; the sandy soil would have been stripped away much earlier, had the lake been around for hundreds or thousands of years. The tree stumps that were cut down in the 1930s stand up out of the water on long, spindly roots that look like tentacles or legs, the roots now exposed from the shallow soil of the Wicklow Mountains.

There are wild things too: willow, gorse, cormorants, swans and even curlew inhabit this strange waterscape. Where one habitat was removed, another was created. And of course, there is the púca – the shape-shifting mythical creature that gives its name to the area – locally said to swim the rivers in the form of a metrelong pike, now free to explore the drowned hearths and roads of the former habitats.

At the end of 2021, I received a Strategic Projects Award from Wicklow Arts Office to invite two other artists, Niamh Fahy and Alannah Robins, to explore the unusual and fascinating site of Poulaphouca Reservoir with me. With the support of Blessington Library, I developed Púca in the Machine (2022), both as an artist and as a producer. This project overlaps many of my areas of interest: myth, ecology, technology, and rural places. I assembled artworks, developed research with the other artists, sourced funding, liaised with organisations, created a tour, and launched a book. The project will now see a second run later this year with three new artists – Margaret O’Brien, Saidhbhín Gibson, and writer Robert Barrett – again supported by Wicklow Arts Office.

I am a project-based artist and work in interlinked strands, collaborating and experimenting on many things simultaneously. Sometimes I assemble artworks, sometimes I manage projects, and often both. My work is about the influence of technology on rural spaces, and I use contemporary digital technologies as artistic media, including writing computer programmes and wiring electronic lights and sensors in interactive installations. Rural landscapes are already transformed by colonial and violent technologies and so I use open source and non-commercial technologies in experimental ways. By using, breaking, manipulating, and philosophically reinventing these electronic media, I try to consider how the relationship between the rural landscape and technology might otherwise exist.

In the last six years, I have lived in four different Irish counties, with the longest stint of four years spent in Wicklow near the border with Kildare. Each place has had a different influence on my work, as have several short-term residencies I have undertaken in Ireland, the UK, and mainland Europe. In late 2021, I became a father, and this wonderful moment in my life also led to another necessary move, this time a return to the north Sligo-Leitrim border, near where I grew up.

On returning, I was lucky to find my feet quickly. I was awarded a six-month residency with the Jackie Clarke Collection, Ballina, Mayo, where I created Assembly (2022), a room-sized interactive art installation about the histories that we choose to collect. This work is exhibiting there until the end of 2023 and was supported by Mayo Arts Office for the Decade of Centenaries. I have also just completed a year-long investigative project exploring the more-than-human aspects of Fuscidea cyathoides lichen on siliceous rocks, supported by Artlink, Fort Dunree in Inishowen, Donegal. This project is continuing this year and will lead to new artworks for exhibition. In September 2022,

I co-founded with three other artists – Tara Baoth Mooney, James Kelly, and Laura McMorrow – a new art space for experimental collaborative research called ^ in Manorhamilton, County Leitrim.

These entangled ideas and moments are a small part of an art practice that evolves and changes every day. This is just a moment, documenting other moments that have happened recently. Ask me again in a year, and I would write this all very differently.

Shane Finan assembles artworks and organises art projects. He is currently living and working in North Leitrim. shanefinan.org

Shane Finan, work in progress image from artwork My Echo, My Shadow and Me (2022), from the project Púca in the Machine side-glow fibre-optic cables, black duck tape, LEDs; image courtesy of the artist.

Shane Finan, Offering, 2021, Raspberry Pi, fence posts, six videos on individual monitors, timber 180x160x25cm, Leitrim Sculpture Centre; photograph courtesy of the artist.