Tracy Fahey
Limerick Institute of Technology, Department of Fine Art, Centre for Postgraduate Studies, Head of the Departments
Dr. Tracy Fahey is Head of the Department of Fine Art and Head of Centre of Postgraduate Studies at Limerick School of Art and Design (LSAD). She has previously worked as Head of Department of Humanities, IT Carlow and Head of Faculty of Design, Griffith College Dublin.
Her main area of research is the Gothic; especially the notion of the Gothic home in Irish contemporary art practice. She has published on this in edited collections on the Gothic by Palgrave, Routledge, Rowman and Littlefield, Manchester University Press and McParland, and is currently working on a monograph for University of Wales Press on contemporary Irish Folk Gothic. She has delivered papers on the Gothic at conferences in Ireland, the UK, Denmark, Sweden, the US and New Zealand. She currently supervises MA students and teaches a seminar programme on Contemporary Gothic as part of the Fine Art Critical and Contextual Studies programme at LSAD.
In 2010 she founded the Limerick-based collaborative gothic art practice, Gothicise, who have produced ghostwalk/ghosttalk (2010), The Double Life of Catherine Street (2011), A Haunting (2011), Waking St. Munchin (2014), Death Cafe Limerick (2015) and the commemorative Remembering Wildgoose Lodge (2013-2016).
Her other main area of research is contemporary design practice. She is Past President of the Institute of Designers in Ireland and a former member of the Board of Design Ireland and of the Board of the Institute of Design and Disability. She has edited a short book on design education – Why Design? Studying Design in Ireland (published 2007 by Office of the Minister of Education) and has published on contemporary design education in Design Philosophy Papers and Creative Axis. Tracy has delivered guest lectures on design in Windesheim University, the Netherlands, University of Applied Sciences, Kouvala, Finland, MI, Bergen, Interior Dekoratorfag Skolen, Oslo, and University of Limerick. She has acted as judge for the Irish Digital Media Awards and currently works as a fashion education judge on the Irish fashion event Junk Kouture since 2012.
In 2013 she established ACADEmy, the LSAD centre for research in fine art, curatorial studies, applied design and education, which has 27 researchers. She acts as principal investigator of the centre which currently runs a funded Creative Europe project into printmaking and symbols of death. She currently sits on the Board of Directors of Limerick Printmakers, and on the advisory board of the Centre for Popular Culture (Auckland University of Technology) and of the Centre for Studies in Otherness (Aarhus University).
Her short fiction is published in thirteen anthologies, and her short fiction collection, The Unheimlich Manoeuvre, was published in 2016, launched at Edge Lit in Derby, UK.
Address: Limerick School of Art and Design
LIT Clare Street Campus
Limerick, Ireland
www.lit/lsad
Her main area of research is the Gothic; especially the notion of the Gothic home in Irish contemporary art practice. She has published on this in edited collections on the Gothic by Palgrave, Routledge, Rowman and Littlefield, Manchester University Press and McParland, and is currently working on a monograph for University of Wales Press on contemporary Irish Folk Gothic. She has delivered papers on the Gothic at conferences in Ireland, the UK, Denmark, Sweden, the US and New Zealand. She currently supervises MA students and teaches a seminar programme on Contemporary Gothic as part of the Fine Art Critical and Contextual Studies programme at LSAD.
In 2010 she founded the Limerick-based collaborative gothic art practice, Gothicise, who have produced ghostwalk/ghosttalk (2010), The Double Life of Catherine Street (2011), A Haunting (2011), Waking St. Munchin (2014), Death Cafe Limerick (2015) and the commemorative Remembering Wildgoose Lodge (2013-2016).
Her other main area of research is contemporary design practice. She is Past President of the Institute of Designers in Ireland and a former member of the Board of Design Ireland and of the Board of the Institute of Design and Disability. She has edited a short book on design education – Why Design? Studying Design in Ireland (published 2007 by Office of the Minister of Education) and has published on contemporary design education in Design Philosophy Papers and Creative Axis. Tracy has delivered guest lectures on design in Windesheim University, the Netherlands, University of Applied Sciences, Kouvala, Finland, MI, Bergen, Interior Dekoratorfag Skolen, Oslo, and University of Limerick. She has acted as judge for the Irish Digital Media Awards and currently works as a fashion education judge on the Irish fashion event Junk Kouture since 2012.
In 2013 she established ACADEmy, the LSAD centre for research in fine art, curatorial studies, applied design and education, which has 27 researchers. She acts as principal investigator of the centre which currently runs a funded Creative Europe project into printmaking and symbols of death. She currently sits on the Board of Directors of Limerick Printmakers, and on the advisory board of the Centre for Popular Culture (Auckland University of Technology) and of the Centre for Studies in Otherness (Aarhus University).
Her short fiction is published in thirteen anthologies, and her short fiction collection, The Unheimlich Manoeuvre, was published in 2016, launched at Edge Lit in Derby, UK.
Address: Limerick School of Art and Design
LIT Clare Street Campus
Limerick, Ireland
www.lit/lsad
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Papers by Tracy Fahey
This paper examines several key projects in Ireland that feature a cultural geographic approach to urban mythmaking including ghostwalk/ghosttalk, The Double Life of Catherine Street, A Haunting and Waking St. Munchin. In examining these specific socially engaged projects it looks at how the projects have worked to (re)construct ‘Other’ histories using multiple narrators. It examines the roles of story-telling and commemorative ceremonies in creating a tension between privileged text and oral narratives. This paper references social memory, cultural geography and the challenges of collaborative practice. It also explores how ideas of identity, history and narrative are challenged through this participatory process.
Dr. Tracy Fahey
This paper proposes the term Irish Folk Gothic as a description for a mode of Gothic art that is directly descended from Irish folklore and which uses legends, rituals and superstitions to animate it. Folk Gothic is taken here as a term that encompasses work that offers a study of the marginal, the liminal, the dispossessed and the unspoken as influenced by Irish folklore. This paper is concerned with how this mode connects with Irish contemporary art practice in relation to depictions of home.
Home is most often represented as a Gothic space in Irish art, a place singled out in folklore as a place to be protected. Since the 1990s, there has been a dramatic re-emergence of the Gothic home in Irish art which draw on folklore for inspiration and which explore and reinterpret superstitions, legends and protective rituals situated in the home. This paper discusses the art of Sean Lynch, Alice Maher, Rita Duffy and Michael Fortune in relation to their depiction of homes that are haunted equally by Gothic concepts and folk motifs; uncanny homes that place a special emphasis on thresholds, borders and stories told within them. Just as ancient folklore was concerned with the protection of home, this art also represents the Irish home as a permeable, dark and even dangerous space. This paper examines how artists explore these folkloric stories, rites and ancient motifs, and how they resurrect, re-form and re-create them as metaphors for contemporary instability. It also considers the role that these artists play in disseminating folklore and contributing to its further development within contemporary culture.
The paper therefore draws together past and present, viewing these Folk Gothic homes of contemporary Irish art as revenant spaces; they are at once echoes of dark domestic rituals, stories and situations from Irish folklore, but also part of its continuing, transdisciplinary evolution.
In Ireland, folklore is most commonly linked to rural spaces. However, The Banshee Lives In The Handball Alley (2004-2005), a film piece by artists Michael Fortune and Aileen Lambert, is situated in the urban environment of Limerick city. Limerick is a city with a rich but dark history, the scene of Viking raids, British sieges and latterly, a place associated with unemployment, social deprivation and gang warfare. The tales told by school children in this piece: of the Green Lady, the Death Coach, the headless coachman, the titular banshee, and other incredible characters, all testify to the remarkable survival of traditional legends among young people, and how these legends have been adapted to reflect the contemporary urban community of Limerick. Fortune and Lambert’s art is based around notions of collecting, preserving and disseminating folklore. Their ethnographic artwork, which is a cross-over between art and folklore, can be seen as an example of ‘Folk Gothic’ a mode of Gothic heavily influenced by folklore and communicated through marginalized voices. Fortune and Lambert work with voicing these tales that stitch themselves through history and culture to emerge in the present day, their elements changed, but their roots evident. These surreal and subversive stories and customs mapped by Fortune and Lambert offer a unique view of a city through the voices of its children, who appear as part of a living tradition of inter-generational storytelling.
This film piece detracts from the common assumption that folklore in Ireland is somehow disappearing; on the contrary, these films expose these Gothic stories as constantly evolving to incorporate references to urban landmarks and icons of contemporary culture. These works also bear out Dundes’s (1975) assertion that folklore continues to be a living, breathing entity. As McDowell comments: ‘[F]olklore is also lived in an organic sense. It is always reshaping and amassing, a culture-wide game of Chinese whispers, and it still exists today in urban legends, gossip and conspiracy theories.’ (2012: 252). This paper examines these tales in terms of their value within contemporary urban culture as stories about forbidden places, behavioural codes transgressed, and rites not followed. It questions what these stories reveal about the tales, their tellers, and their city of origin.
“Irish culture is sedimentary. By this I mean that things don’t get obliterated, they get buried. They are covered with a new layer of history but they are still down there, like bodies preserved in bogs…What Sigmund Freud called “the return of the repressed” is the very stuff of Irish art. It is haunted by ghosts and revenants. Nothing is ever really dead.”(O’Toole, 2011)
This paper proposes Irish Folk Gothic as a term for a mode of Gothic that is directly descended from Irish folklore and which uses legends, rituals and superstitions to animate creative practice. Folk Gothic is taken here as a term that encompasses work that offers an interdisciplinary study of the marginal, the liminal, the dispossessed and the unspoken as influenced by Irish folklore. This paper is concerned with how this mode connects with Irish contemporary art practice through an examination of the trope of strange spaces like faery forts, whitethorn bushes, and holy wells that persist from folklore and that are depicted in contemporary Irish art. It views the contemporary work of Irish artists Sean Lynch, Martin Healy, Tim Robinson and Gwen O’Dowd as intimately connected with folklore and the Gothic. It examines the idea of the legend, tales told as true, as a connecting device between folklore and the Gothic. Using these intertwined spaces and narratives as a connecting device between these traditions, this paper examines contemporary Irish art, its Gothic themes and tropes and its utilization of motifs and methodologies drawn from Irish folklore.
Abstract
This short paper proposes to outline artist explorations of the dark passages of medical Gothic. It focuses on the idea of the patient experience, and the personal narratives of medicine, which are often silenced or occluded within medical discourse. Medical practice in the West is dominated by the biomedical model with its emphasis on laboratory findings; the idea of identifying illness or disease in isolation from the patient experience, and consequently neglecting the embodied knowledge of the patient which can be expressed through pathographies or personal medical narratives.
In Ireland, several contemporary artists have explored issues of health, illness, the medical experience and the body using Gothic tropes and themes, in a way that confronts the viewer with these missing patient voices, and raises serious issues to do with diagnosis, treatment, and models of medical cooperation. Aideen Barry uses film and animation to examine issues of mental health and female anxiety, linking this work with both Freud’s notion of hysteria and the nineteenth century Gothic literary trope of the confined woman. In her clay, textile and photographic pieces, Sinead Dinneen explores first person narratives of anger, darkness and even humour surrounding cancer diagnosis using Gothic motifs of birds, cages, and the defiant female body that subverts both the male and the medical gaze. Dinneen has also run a series of workshops focused on voicing unspoken experiences as part of conferences, exhibitions, healthcare fora, cancer support groups, and as part of Limerick’s first Death Café; where people meet and discuss end of life experiences in a non-medical environment.
In examining the work of these artists, this paper hopes to illustrate the way in which art can work sympathetically with the fraught world of medical diagnosis and treatment, and how it can help reposition previously silenced patient narratives as crucial to understanding and sharing medical experiences.
This paper examines several key projects in Ireland that feature a cultural geographic approach to urban mythmaking including ghostwalk/ghosttalk, The Double Life of Catherine Street, A Haunting and Waking St. Munchin. In examining these specific socially engaged projects it looks at how the projects have worked to (re)construct ‘Other’ histories using multiple narrators. It examines the roles of story-telling and commemorative ceremonies in creating a tension between privileged text and oral narratives. This paper references social memory, cultural geography and the challenges of collaborative practice. It also explores how ideas of identity, history and narrative are challenged through this participatory process.
Dr. Tracy Fahey
This paper proposes the term Irish Folk Gothic as a description for a mode of Gothic art that is directly descended from Irish folklore and which uses legends, rituals and superstitions to animate it. Folk Gothic is taken here as a term that encompasses work that offers a study of the marginal, the liminal, the dispossessed and the unspoken as influenced by Irish folklore. This paper is concerned with how this mode connects with Irish contemporary art practice in relation to depictions of home.
Home is most often represented as a Gothic space in Irish art, a place singled out in folklore as a place to be protected. Since the 1990s, there has been a dramatic re-emergence of the Gothic home in Irish art which draw on folklore for inspiration and which explore and reinterpret superstitions, legends and protective rituals situated in the home. This paper discusses the art of Sean Lynch, Alice Maher, Rita Duffy and Michael Fortune in relation to their depiction of homes that are haunted equally by Gothic concepts and folk motifs; uncanny homes that place a special emphasis on thresholds, borders and stories told within them. Just as ancient folklore was concerned with the protection of home, this art also represents the Irish home as a permeable, dark and even dangerous space. This paper examines how artists explore these folkloric stories, rites and ancient motifs, and how they resurrect, re-form and re-create them as metaphors for contemporary instability. It also considers the role that these artists play in disseminating folklore and contributing to its further development within contemporary culture.
The paper therefore draws together past and present, viewing these Folk Gothic homes of contemporary Irish art as revenant spaces; they are at once echoes of dark domestic rituals, stories and situations from Irish folklore, but also part of its continuing, transdisciplinary evolution.
In Ireland, folklore is most commonly linked to rural spaces. However, The Banshee Lives In The Handball Alley (2004-2005), a film piece by artists Michael Fortune and Aileen Lambert, is situated in the urban environment of Limerick city. Limerick is a city with a rich but dark history, the scene of Viking raids, British sieges and latterly, a place associated with unemployment, social deprivation and gang warfare. The tales told by school children in this piece: of the Green Lady, the Death Coach, the headless coachman, the titular banshee, and other incredible characters, all testify to the remarkable survival of traditional legends among young people, and how these legends have been adapted to reflect the contemporary urban community of Limerick. Fortune and Lambert’s art is based around notions of collecting, preserving and disseminating folklore. Their ethnographic artwork, which is a cross-over between art and folklore, can be seen as an example of ‘Folk Gothic’ a mode of Gothic heavily influenced by folklore and communicated through marginalized voices. Fortune and Lambert work with voicing these tales that stitch themselves through history and culture to emerge in the present day, their elements changed, but their roots evident. These surreal and subversive stories and customs mapped by Fortune and Lambert offer a unique view of a city through the voices of its children, who appear as part of a living tradition of inter-generational storytelling.
This film piece detracts from the common assumption that folklore in Ireland is somehow disappearing; on the contrary, these films expose these Gothic stories as constantly evolving to incorporate references to urban landmarks and icons of contemporary culture. These works also bear out Dundes’s (1975) assertion that folklore continues to be a living, breathing entity. As McDowell comments: ‘[F]olklore is also lived in an organic sense. It is always reshaping and amassing, a culture-wide game of Chinese whispers, and it still exists today in urban legends, gossip and conspiracy theories.’ (2012: 252). This paper examines these tales in terms of their value within contemporary urban culture as stories about forbidden places, behavioural codes transgressed, and rites not followed. It questions what these stories reveal about the tales, their tellers, and their city of origin.
“Irish culture is sedimentary. By this I mean that things don’t get obliterated, they get buried. They are covered with a new layer of history but they are still down there, like bodies preserved in bogs…What Sigmund Freud called “the return of the repressed” is the very stuff of Irish art. It is haunted by ghosts and revenants. Nothing is ever really dead.”(O’Toole, 2011)
This paper proposes Irish Folk Gothic as a term for a mode of Gothic that is directly descended from Irish folklore and which uses legends, rituals and superstitions to animate creative practice. Folk Gothic is taken here as a term that encompasses work that offers an interdisciplinary study of the marginal, the liminal, the dispossessed and the unspoken as influenced by Irish folklore. This paper is concerned with how this mode connects with Irish contemporary art practice through an examination of the trope of strange spaces like faery forts, whitethorn bushes, and holy wells that persist from folklore and that are depicted in contemporary Irish art. It views the contemporary work of Irish artists Sean Lynch, Martin Healy, Tim Robinson and Gwen O’Dowd as intimately connected with folklore and the Gothic. It examines the idea of the legend, tales told as true, as a connecting device between folklore and the Gothic. Using these intertwined spaces and narratives as a connecting device between these traditions, this paper examines contemporary Irish art, its Gothic themes and tropes and its utilization of motifs and methodologies drawn from Irish folklore.
Abstract
This short paper proposes to outline artist explorations of the dark passages of medical Gothic. It focuses on the idea of the patient experience, and the personal narratives of medicine, which are often silenced or occluded within medical discourse. Medical practice in the West is dominated by the biomedical model with its emphasis on laboratory findings; the idea of identifying illness or disease in isolation from the patient experience, and consequently neglecting the embodied knowledge of the patient which can be expressed through pathographies or personal medical narratives.
In Ireland, several contemporary artists have explored issues of health, illness, the medical experience and the body using Gothic tropes and themes, in a way that confronts the viewer with these missing patient voices, and raises serious issues to do with diagnosis, treatment, and models of medical cooperation. Aideen Barry uses film and animation to examine issues of mental health and female anxiety, linking this work with both Freud’s notion of hysteria and the nineteenth century Gothic literary trope of the confined woman. In her clay, textile and photographic pieces, Sinead Dinneen explores first person narratives of anger, darkness and even humour surrounding cancer diagnosis using Gothic motifs of birds, cages, and the defiant female body that subverts both the male and the medical gaze. Dinneen has also run a series of workshops focused on voicing unspoken experiences as part of conferences, exhibitions, healthcare fora, cancer support groups, and as part of Limerick’s first Death Café; where people meet and discuss end of life experiences in a non-medical environment.
In examining the work of these artists, this paper hopes to illustrate the way in which art can work sympathetically with the fraught world of medical diagnosis and treatment, and how it can help reposition previously silenced patient narratives as crucial to understanding and sharing medical experiences.
Teaching theoretical subjects within the creative curriculum is a challenge for educators, with many students reluctant to engage with text-based disciplines which they see having little or no relevance to their studio practice. For the last three years I have carried out a/r/tographic research with fine art students in the context of a Gothic seminar series in order to straddle this divide between theory and practice, and to re-invigorate theory by placing it in a practical context.
My proposed research will build especially on work by Feinstein (2005) and Sederholm (2005) who have explored alternative and participative methods of teaching Gothic literature. However, there has been no significant work carried out in relation to the use of participative and practice-based pedagogies in teaching the Gothic within the fine art curriculum; it is this gap that my research hopes to address, both in terms of investigating how students learn through participative work and to outline a possible model of practice in teaching the Gothic in the fine arts curriculum.
The central hypothesis of this proposal is therefore a research and practice-based enquiry into the use of practice-based pedagogies in teaching the Gothic in the fine art curriculum. This is illustrated using collaborative work carried out by art collective Gothicise and the use of online curated exhibitions of Gothic art work.
Keywords: a/r/tography, Gothic, fine art, art-based research, pedagogy