CARRIERS OF MEMORY AND HISTORY.

Anne O’Callaghan, 2023

CARRIERS OF MEMORY AND HISTORY.

Anne O’Callaghan, 2023

Traversée crossing Etymology. From Middle English traversen, from Old French traverser, from Latin trans (“across”) + versus (“turned”), perfect passive participle of Latin vertere (“to turn”). traverse (n.) “act of passing through a gate, crossing a bridge, etc.,” mid-14c., from Old French travers, from traverser (see traverse (v.) Meaning “a passage by which one may traverse” is recorded from 1670s. Military fortification sense of “barrier, barricade” is recorded from 1590s. flora and fauna species has/have correlations to policies regarding immigration, migrants Latin migrare “to move from one place to another” alien belonging to a foreign country or nation. An invasive species is an organism that is not indigenous, or native, to a particular area. an animal or plant living or growing in a region to which it has migrated.

As a gardener and artist exploring the buried socio-political history of gardens, CARRIERS OF MEMORY AND HISTORY, is based on my response to readings and research in poetry, politics, and the history of plants and herbariums. -

Growing up in Ireland I was surrounded by all sorts of wonderful trees and plants that I took for granted, and the Monkey Puzzle Trees, not great climbing trees, but as a child the name intrigued me. Palm Trees, azaleas, roses, daffodils and many more. As a young adult, I loved gardens and never wondered where these wondrous plants come from. I have a childhood memory of tying up the daffodils when their season was over. One of my early household jobs. My mother was the gardener, winter roses, daffodils, tulips, wallflowers, lupins, snapdragons, one could go on and on. But like the majority of flowers in Canadian gardens, they did not originate in Ireland, but were transplanted from far away places via the botanists and plant hunters from Europe. I started my “hunt” for the history and origin of plants some 25 years ago, The history and the journeys of these plants tell us much about culture, politics and the moniterization of humans, as it is about botanicals. home, place, memory, identity

https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/encyclopaedialo181821lond

www.unibo.it/it

The Columbian Exchange, a reference to the exchange of diseases, ideas, food crops, and most horrendous of all people as commodities slavery between the New World and the Old World from 1492 to the present. Parts of Europe, and later the US fought for the control of territory, and what those territories had under the ground, above the ground. Gardens, flowers and Trees are a cultural history of place, of land clearings, of transplanting, of writing out a peoples history and culture of changing the landscape of a newly acquired territory. The fact is that most of our plants came either from New World-Asia, Asia Minor, Africa or South and Central America. The 1700-1800 was a time of intense curiosity about all things exotic/foreign. Many plants originate from collecting expeditions, and were preserved as both scientific and horticultural specimens, in a herbarium. A herbarium is a collection of dried plants or fungi used for scientific study. In the 16th century, Luca Ghini (1490-1556) is credited to be the first person to press and preserve plants under pressure, then bind the specimens within a book.

Herbarium book with Japanese plants, Siebold collection Leiden, 1825

https://brill.com/search?q1=++++Herbarium+book+with+Japanese+plants%2C+Siebold+collection+Leiden%2C+1825

unruly: the package said,

plant in full sun

more instructions rich soil I could smell the soil as it baked in the sun no flowers Beside the chain link fence

rocks and garbage

there you flourished dancing freely unruly Anne O’Callaghan, 2021

A woodland, near Irby on the Wirral Peninsula, in Merseyside, in North West England, 2018

The Romans are known to have planted narcissus in memory of loved ones or comrades fallen in battle. It’s likely they brought daffodils to Britain from the Iberian Peninsula, predominantly Spain and Portugal, where the largest variety of daffodil species are found.

Flowers carriers of memory and history. In many of her writings (her novel Lucy in particular) Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid has written and spoken about her relationship with that quintessentially British, Wordsworthian flower, the daffodil. In Dances with Daffodils, Kincaid tells of how her feelings about the flower—which she learned to dislike after being forced to memorize William Wordsworth’s poem on the subject— ...In my child’s mind’s eye, the poem and its contents (though not its author) and the people through whom it came were repulsive...JK Since settling in Vermont and becoming a gardener, Kincaid has reconciled herself to the much-disliked flower of her youth. She has planted 5,500 daffodil bulbs in her garden, wanting to ...walk out into my yard, unable to move at will because my feet are snarled in the graceful long green stems supporting bent yellow flowering heads of daffodils... Jamaica Kincaid Gardening Is a Kind of Colonialism https://channel.louisiana.dk/video/jamaica-kincaid-gardening-is-a-kind-of-colonialism

These plants, daffodils etc for the most part, arrived in North America and Britain, as a result of human activity. Their stories have many parts, they speak of journeys, uprooting, their place in the landscape and they speak about cultural heritage. Plants tell the stories of generations of uprooting and transplanting.

Jamaica Kincaid and I are similar in age, and grew up where British Colonial Power had a strong presence. The Irish population constantly battled against the British. My mother as a child attended the funeral of Michael Collins. I don’t remember Wordsworth poems, maybe I did learn it, but I do remember the stories of the Irish Monks who travelled the world (small world-Britain, Europe and North Africa), about Cú Chulainn a warrior hero and demigod in Irish mythology. And what Irish child would not know all the names of those who took part in the rebellion of 1916. When I came to Canada in 1968, my going away present from my mum and dad was a slim volume of W. B Yeats poems. The Wild Swans at Coole, 1919, so as not to forget that I am Irish, as if. And every time Seamus Heanny published a new volume of poems, a copy arrived by mail. For me daffodila were just pretty yellow flowers that grew all over Ireland. When I read Jamaica Kincaid response to Wordsworth poem, “Daffodils” (1804). She reinforced the power of language, of stories, and how they influence who we are.

Nelson’s Pillar was a large granite column capped by a statue of Horatio Nelson, built in the centre in Dublin, Ireland, 1809. We were still part of the of the United Kingdom. In March 1966, an explosives planted by Irish republicans knocked Nelson down. As a child for few pence you could climb to the top of the pillar and have a grand view of Dublin. Antigua still has a Nelson’s Dockyard

Flora patterns were all the rage in Lace, and for the Victorians the more elobrate the more diserable. Mary Bailey (177 5?-1828) laments gradually reveals buried layers of history and inbedded class structure rule.

The City of Woman. A Nottingham lace runner and self-taught poet Mary Bailey (177 5?-1828) laments her working conditions in Petition to the British Fair addressed to wealthy “ladies of Britain, we most humbly dress” How hard have we worked, and our eyes how we’ve strain’d When those beautiful flowers we run. View the ball-room, where beauty beams round, And shines with such elegant grace, And think you in no ways indebted to us.— The Runners of Nottingham lace.

https://silktosiliconshow.com/essays/programming-lace

Memories of Home A lace curtain, on a window of the Bradshaw homestead in Namadgi National Park. Which is located in Ngunnawal Country, an ancient and diverse lanscape managed by Ngunnawal people for tens of thousands of years.

“One of art’s functions is to recall that which is absent – whether it is history, or the unconscious, or form, or social justice” Lucy Lippard

Similar to enslaved American Indians and Africans, indentured servants could have their contracts sold at market to different bidders, could be physically punished, and in some contexts, servants were not allowed to marry or have children without the permission of their contract holder. Labor and disease conditions for early colonial indentured servants were also brutal and many died before the end of their contract. Attempting to flee their servitude could lead to punishment and added years to their contract. In addition, while many indentured servants came willingly to the Americas due to periods of low wages and poor living conditions in Western Europe, significant numbers were also kidnapped, or transported as convict labor. I wonder if the woman who hung this lace curtin, in a cabin with newpapers on the wall to keep the cold out in the winter or to create home, was a lace runner. Did she bring this curtain with her as a memory or in the long winter nights create a memory of home. We know that 104 male and nine female convicts were tried at the Nottingham Assizes and later sentenced to transporation to Australian penal colonies. Of course this image/this curtain cannot be original. In On the Beaten Tract: Tourism, Art and Place; Lippard talks about “our willingness to let national Parks and heritage sites define nature and history, this is a constructed space. But I like to think, that the woman who lived here had a way to connect to that place we call home. Flowers, Lace curtains, memories.

https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/africanpassageslowcountryadapt/introductionatlanticworld/new-world-labor-systems--europ

Stillness Immense turn in the deep black, small points of light, faint gleam or slash along some buried axis, white reticulated wink. Size only guessed but staggering: swing of infinite compounded rhythms through the unthought reach. Each note pure, perfectly distinct: the graveness of a star. Whom did this grow within? Slow ramified unfolding, sky of a summer night that hung the crystal arch above us, hummed silence. But who is it that heard, who could have thought that it might go like this about the rolling piecemeal world? It is the impossibility of life as art. Analysis was never meant to hold or judge: a purifier of the ore it cannot comprehend. Don’t rest your weight on earth, for this suspend yourself from heaven. Then there will be light enough to leave untouched the truth of each thing as it is. We will be different.

Note From: J.Lynn Campbell.

Jan Zwicky, Wittgenstein Elegies , Section One: Philosophers’ Stone

Anne O’Callaghan is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans over three decades. In creating her artworks O’Callaghan uses a range of media, including photography, installation work, video, and sculpture. She uses whatever medium she feels will be most effective in putting across a particular idea. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, Europe, Australia, USA and Asia. O’Callaghan, was co-curator of the Tree Museum from 1998 to 2016 and a member of the “intersperse curatorial collective. In 2021 O’Callaghan was invited to join the Hatchery Artists, a collective based in England. Her most current exhibitions: an online exhibition CMS ARTS PROJECTS (2022): Self Portrait with Emily Dickinson: photographs and text, Cedar Ridge Gallery Scarborough, Ontario (2022): Attraverso l’arte. La galleria IL GABBIANO 1968-2018. Cinquant’anni di ricerca artistica, Centro di Arte Moderna e Cemporanea, La Spezia Italy (2022). Born in Ireland, O’Callaghan immigrated to Canada in 1968, and lives and works in Toronto

Design, Photography and text Anne O’Callaghan. © Anne O’Callaghan, 2023All rights reserved