Flaneire: Travels in an Alien Land
By embodying the spirit of the flâneur I am exploring the 32 counties of Ireland/Éire visually by road and foot, and Travels in an Alien Land refers to my relationship with this island. My work questions the illusory notions of home and identity, asking if they can ever be found in a place or a culture supposedly one’s ‘own’. Despite my ‘insider’ status, I still see Ireland, north and south, through the eyes of a tourist, an outsider, a visitor.
Born in an evangelical home in Belfast, I inherited a faith I no longer hold, in the wider political culture of Unionism, to which I could not subscribe. I came of age in a city - in a Troubles-induced stasis - from which I could not wait to leave. I somehow always felt I was looking in from the outside, despite my insider credentials. Ironically, having left Ireland I lived for 19 years in Japan, a culture literally closed to the outside for 250 years. In Japan gaijin (foreigner) translates as ‘outside person’. My knowledge of the language and culture granted me a privileged level of access to the inside, but I was made constantly aware of the fragility of that status; I found a ‘home’, however transient, in a place that could never be home. I lived in Dublin for 4 years, a city I was raised to suspect of treachery, to which Ulster Protestants would someday be ‘sold out’, with an Irish passport that many see as a betrayal of my (inherited) Britishness and culture, and am now in Belfast, a city from which I've been in flight for 30 years.
