with camera rolling
standing
on a hedge
on some grass
on on a street
in a woodland
in an industrial park
somewhere in or around Limerick, Ireland
looking
this thing i’ve found myself doing
a kind of ritual –
spending time
gawping
waiting for the landscape
to reveal things to me

and there are many times more where I choose not to lug my camera along with me. the goal wouldn’t exactly be to mediatise it all anyway would it? it’s more about practising a way of living, seeing and y’know in a way I suppose, amn’t I glad to be out and about
all the same
roaming the homeland
isn’t that it
gawping

when I’m looking
I see things like
buildings (lots of kinds) - some are houses, others workplaces - manufacturing plants, waste facilities, offices - and infrastructural things - that make humming noises and have weird smells - like stuff for water and electricity probably - roads, big ones small ones medium ones - fields, agriculture, lots of cattle - hedges fences walls ditches dikes - rivers and streams running at their speeds - branches blowing about the place - all quite normal stuff really - and isn't that the point?

some placenames: Kiltanna, Kilcoleman, Rathkeale, Castlematrix, Aughinish Alumina, Ballycar, Parteen, National Technology Park, Cratloe, Gortadroma, Keeper Hill, Ardnacrusha, Cruise’s Street, O’Callaghan Strand, Lough Gur, Annacotty Business Park

I've had a long relationship with many of these places. their images are furnished with personal memories and meaning - like all the times I stood on the sideline at the local GAA pitch, or when I stayed in the village messing when the school bus didn’t come during snow, or from the window at home every morning, seeing the Aughinish smokestacks rising in the distance -
but that’s just me

now I begin to feel something
maybe as my blood calms, and my senses slowly open
and instead of being a coloniser/voyeur with my video camera - I am a constituent part of the landscape

the landscape offers up artefacts, characteristics, traces, remnants of past (it’s all a remnant of past isn’t it?) - fragments of future. the landscape unfolds its many layers - it presents in a haunted flux state - an unnavigable tangled dynamic of potential pasts and futures, making up present reality - things which occurred that will occur again - somehow (must they?). all the tragedies and oppressions and hardships I don’t need to name that permeate Irish consciousness - and the joy and glory days, dancing and music, feasting and jubilation, rewarding hard work, friendship and meitheal

the land holds multiplicities - many-voiced (human and non-human) - some you hear, babbling to eternity
many held down deep
bogsunk mem’ry
secrets devour’d by worms

I’m quick to think of the landscape as human culture - landscape as a stage for human dramas to unfold, writ with layers of human story. and I think of our agency over the land - our exploitation of it - our poisoning of it - the sick land -
disaster spelled for the future. how might we change tactic? how might care for the sick land?

but here, taking note of the land as it appears to be, it doesn’t necessarily appear overtly fussed about human culture. some buildings I see are as yet only half-built, many others I see are neglected and forgotten - becoming reclaimed by creeping mosses and plants and insects and birds and the odd rat no doubt. all are works-in-progress. without us, things carry on nonetheless
things will change

we can draw as many dividing lines as we like across the surface of the land - but despite our best efforts, the land cannot be owned
we are not its master
the land is unownable
we do not write its history
the landscape
is beyond us

staring
staring at the landscape
gawping at the landscape
until time becomes liquid

plant landscape, animal landscape, voice of fungus and bacterium and virus, and human.
long ago it probably used to have different animals
like cows that look a bit funny or different
or butterflies that were massive. and the humans - I think of the old Irish pagans and how I like their idea of a cyclical time, moving thru the seasons - and I think of them eating all different kinds of mushrooms and having mad psychedelic sensuous experiences, where they felt deeply connected to a more than human landscape, and drew mad spiral shapes on stones. I’d be interested to hear what kind of sounds they made - maybe they still echo, too

and do I long for some kind of regression into tribalism - is that what this is all about? would that solve whatever problems I think there are? for now, I’m not sure how that can happen - with us having starbucks and iPads and all
but anyway
I quietly reach over
and press 'stop record'