This body of work explores the Irish diaspora through the objects that migrants bring with them when they emigrate. I began by researching my great-grandmother who emigrated to Ireland in 1900. I used online archives and information gathered from relatives to learn as much about her as possible. I learned that she was orphaned at 12 and then emigrated to Australia at 18. I was not able to find any information on her during her formative years. I found that I paths had been similar, I left my native Australia at 11 and came to Ireland to attend university at age 20. I pulled on family stories and identified three objects that had been taken by my great grandmother from Ireland to Australia: a cross, a harp and a candlestick. I made moulds of these three objects and cast them in sugar glass. Sugar was the motor behind so much historical migrations and created casts that weren’t stable. They would degrade and begin to melt quite quickly. I produced photographic prints that were sublimated onto Japanese mulberry paper. This process created very delicate, dreamlike, distant prints. I took photos of the land surrounding my house. Half of the images were of idealised landscapes; the others were of the aftermath of logging. These photographs question my own idealised view of Irish land and a post-colonial view of the Irish landscape as a locus of colonialism.The final part of my degree show was a performance piece in which I cut a bed in half. I made the bed frame and mattress myself. The frame was stained to match the wood in my space and the mattress was stuffed with straw. The performance drew from ideas around the bed as the centre of the house which is historically the domain of the woman. In the performance I cut the bed in two, symbolising the psychic and physical separation that occurs when one leaves their home to migrate to another country.
