Linen
Memorial
Northern Ireland Troubles

The Centre for Colonialism and its Aftermath's annual End-of-Year Work-in-Progress seminar on Friday 27 November in Launceston.

The objective is to tell other people working in the broad areas of colonial and postcolonial studies about your current research project, and to hear their responses and suggestions; to gather together unexpected synergies which may arise during the day; these occasions are always intellectually stimulating.

My Linen Memorial presentation today is in the impressive Tamar Valley Centre Room of the Albert Hall.

For more information about the Centre for Colonialism and its Aftermath (CAIA) conference agenda and research group, please have a look at our website colonial.arts.utas.edu.au

The Linen Memorial was conceived and created in 2001 as a way in which art may contribute to healing the wounds of The Troubles. by sculptor Lycia Danielle Trouton, (born Belfast). It is an alternative history of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. It can be understood as a counter-monument which is a non-heirarchical list of names of those killed in order to remember the people.

Names are being slowly embroidered onto handkerchiefs; a funerary record of the toll of human lives during Northern Ireland's sectarian violence; persons listed (commemorated) are on ALL sides of the political divide, listed without bias.

The original artwork was conceived and developed in February 2001, with my visual art Canada Council of the Arts funding, and was exhibited from September 7, 2001 to October 20, 2001 as part of the Natural Causes exhibit, in Ellensburgh, near Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.; curator Cheryl Hahn. My artwork was entitled, Between Worlds: The Common Body in a group exhibition on the theme of the ways in which one?s identity or autobiography was informed by one's landscape art practice. I created an installation 'room' where the drapery formed four walls of a memorial, beneath a blacked-out skylight in a foyer at the top of a flight of over twenty-five steep steps. In the centre of this room was a coffin-sized configuration of blocks of compressed peat moss (similar to Irish bog oak), upon which an image of a body was projected.

The list and order of names of all those killed is held in the public record and is also freely available on the world wide web yet primarily attributed, by the chronological listing, to David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, David McVea and Chris Thornton, "Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children Who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles" (Mainstream Publishing: 2000). In an “act of public service journalism;”  these journalists used pinpointed the moment of each person’s death, linked these deaths with contemporary computer-aided database search and file techniques, in effect “patterning” the deaths together; as well, they catalogued general factual information about the person’s life and, in a poignant way, documented the moments before each person was killed.

The inclusion of all the names of the dead is controversial as it is non-hierarchical: perpetrators or terrorists are listed alongside victims; persons on either side of the sectarian divide are listed one after another. I do not make attempts at categorization regarding affiliations. The (Irish) Linen Memorial presents dispassionate and the unembellished facts of a names list on linen. My transposition of a names list onto a textile medium places a feminist emphasis upon the body. The private rituals of grief, mourning and continued attempts at healing from trauma can be categorized as types of commemorative practices, without losing sight of the divisive social-historical context within which those killings occurred due to the conflict.

The (Irish) Linen Memorial explores underlying conceptual themes governing the binary opposites of intimacy/politics, public and private, investigative journalism and commemorative art-making, and suggests a movement beyond extreme divisions through an exploration of the excluded middle (E.Grosz). By doing so, I am working to dissolve, undo or unpick differences. The (Irish) Linen Memorial is an artwork based on contemporary research at the intersection between grief and post-traumatic stress, drawing on contemporary cultural history and ‘memory studies’. The construction of the memorial was also informed by my personal artistic journey as a member of the Irish Diaspora to the countries of Canada (1970 – 84), U.S.A.(1985 – 2000), Australia (2001 – 2005) and Northern Ireland in both 1999 and again in 2006 –8.

Throughout the creation of the memorial, I imagined its eventual unveiling as a public art piece in an interface neighbourhood such as at The Waterworks in North Belfast or in Omagh or Derry, Northern Ireland. This has yet to be determined. In 2011, the memorial will tour in Quebec, Canada, as a part of the Flax and Linen Biennale. This artwork contributes to the debate about whether or not the poetics of art traverses politics. It is my hope that the The (Irish) Linen Memorial may aid with new theories of interculturalism in Northern Ireland/Ireland, public citizenship in an wired, highly mobile[xi] age in the U.K. and Ireland, and Irish Diaspora migration studies to do with kinship and interculturalism. As well, as a metaphor for social change, the artwork-memorial-counter-monument may be able to aid scholarship about sustainable cross-community relations and/or restorative justice initiatives in Northern Ireland.

In post-conflict Northern Ireland, people can visit The Linen Memorial annually on The Private Day of Reflection. From 2007, Northern Ireland introduced an 'open' Day of 'Private' Reflection on the summer solstice, 21st July, to consider the conflict and to think about those killed. In 2007 and 2008 The Linen Memorial was at The CroÍ at The Corrymeela Community, Ballycastle, N. Ireland.