Emer McGarry offers insights into works included in the thematic exhibition ‘Inheritance’
What passes from one generation to the next is not always counted or named. It lives in stories and songs, in languages carried forward, in landscapes held in trust, in gestures of care that bind us to one another and to the natural world. The exhibition ‘Inheritance’ invites us to reflect on these quiet forms of continuity, to ask what endures across generations and what truly enriches our lives. It traces the long afterlives of imperial erasures, extractions and monuments, while holding fast to possibility.
Kathy Prendergast’s The End and the Beginning II (1996), a small wooden spool wound with strands of hair from three generations of the artist’s family – her mother, herself and her son – carries immense symbolic weight. Prendergast’s work frames inheritance not as property or wealth but as an embodied continuity, passed quite literally through the fibre of our being.
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