Objects, Place & Time

Wooden block wheel c 400 BC, National Irish Museum, Dublin

This wooden wheel in the National Irish Museum in Dublin spoke to me of the quest to make life easier. It was nearly three thousand years old and has survived as an object of ingenuity, craftsmanship and industry. Perhaps it was once on a wagon to transport people, grain or animals. More than likely it was used to transport armaments.

Go to a museum anywhere in Europe or Great Britain and you will find a chronicle of battles and armaments. These are what has survived through time to tell their stories. However, in amongst those war stories is a thread of everyday survival; of ornamental jewellery, pottery made to store food and water, ceremonial stone carvings and geometric calculations lost in translation.

As Ireland has a strong Celtic and early Christian tradition, there were several rooms in the national museum dedicated to Power, Prayer and Pilgrimage: making places with objects. I loved this idea that places can be encapsulated by the objects that we make there. Words too, surviving in fragments of manuscripts wrapped in leather bindings, preserved because they were buried in bogs or peat. They too are ‘of the place’.

It makes you think of the objects we create in our own lives. What do they tell us about our place? Are they for everyday utility, or are they made to be treasured and passed down through generations? What then of ephemeral creations; of music, performance and consumable art? How do we record and encapsulate our offerings or is it really necessary? Maybe its not about permanence but the process of creation….

All these thoughts run through my mind when I go to museums. As I’m on a short jaunt into Ireland between the modules of my university course, a trip to the National Museum in Dublin was first on my itinerary. I’m always thinking of the narrative and how history is preserved through the tales told by others.

St Columba is more widely known than St Moluag who was also an Irish Christian monk around at the same time. The difference being that St Columba’s story was chronicled through the writings of St Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People..

It helps to have a biographer, someone who can tell your story. It helps that it is a favourable rendition as well. Drinking coffee in a Dublin cafe, I overhead a woman talking about Van Gogh as ‘that crazy man”. Not saying “that great artist” or that “passionate soul who expressed himself through colour”. Vincent Van Gogh was dismissed as ‘crazy’ and that is the predominant story that has been passed down through time.

Many artists are super sensitive people, who feel passionately and seek solitude in order to focus on their creative output. How do they tell their story? It is fortunate that Van Gogh’s brother collected his paintings and they were passed down through his family so that we can treasure them today. These too are objects of place and time.

Which brings me to football! A very strange segue but a narrative that I always seem to encounter in my travels. This weekend, the Americans were in Dublin to kick off the grid iron football season. Where better to do it than in Ireland! Strange I would have thought, but it certainly brought thousands into the city to celebrate, drink Guinness and spend their money. Even the Irish were bemused but happy to have the cash registers ringing.

It’s hard not to be a consumable tourist as souvenirs are, by their very nature, objects of time and place. They validate our travels and bring something of resonance home with us. I still have the silk shawls my great uncle brought back from China 100 years ago. There is always that urge to collect and touch an object which carries its story of time and place.

I am trying to be very careful with what I chose to carry and bring home. Now that we no longer have our motorhome to hoard objects in, we have to be very prudent with bulk and weight in our two suitcases. I have a tiny ruby red glass vase I brought from a church charity I will bring home. It will always remind me of flowers picked and brought into the motorhome during our time in England. No snow globes though or green shamrocks. I’ll leave that to the football fans ….

Dublin central on Saturday with streets closed off, parades and football banners for the grid iron match.