Emer McGarry considers the work of Marianne Keating, which brings to light overlooked stories of Irish migration, labour and resistance
Marianne Keating is an Irish artist based in London, whose practice engages with archival materials to illuminate overlooked histories and interrogate the processes through which memory, truth and collective imagination are constructed. Her work navigates the complex terrain between visual culture, postcolonial theory and historical inquiry.
Keating’s doctoral research, titled ‘“They Don’t Do Much in the Cane-Hole Way”: Hidden Histories of the Irish Diaspora in Jamaica’ (2021) investigates the largely unacknowledged presence of Irish emigrants and their descendants in Jamaica, reconstructing this history through its fragmented archival remnants. In doing so, as Keating describes it, she examines ‘the creolisation of the Irish in Jamaica and the resulting legacies in contemporary Jamaica’.
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