My graduate work ‘(down to a) Monochromatic Fault’ ruminates on a speculative relationship between Dunsink Landfill, Finglas and Poolbeg Incinerator through the two sites' respective ties to the Early 19th Century ‘Ordnance Survey’, reflecting on extraction, commodification, waste and value. The work is a spatial essay mapping parallels between the ‘Irish Pastoral’ and ‘Industrial Ruins’ in the context of Ireland’s historical relationship to photography, contemporary technologies and digital systems which reshape Irish Landscape and collective memory. I explored this through installation, incorporating spectral fragments of works, working with found digital material. The installation style feels intentionally restless and indeterminate, as if just a thought loosely ruminating within a space. I navigate both the digital ‘post site’ and historical residuals of tangible landscapes, capturing both the physical and digital debris of regrowth, development and degrowth. Through appropriating colonial objects, such as the ‘folly’ and the ‘daguerreotype’, I aim to highlight cyclical infrastructural layers. My practice interrogates Ireland's colonial past in relation to technological systems and their consequential impact on landscape, labour and collective memory. Through a process which spans across writing, sculptural photography, moving image and sound, I explore the constraint between analogue and digital modes of production. By weaving together archival and literary research, fieldwork and material remnants, I examine layered histories to challenge ideas of technological growth and linear progress. My research is informed by concepts of decolonial practices and digital cultures, placing particular emphasis on the tensions of ‘resolved’ and ‘unresolved’ in both my research and artistic outputs.
