To Unknown Ancestors and the Melancholy of Ireland - Dress

Hello, I’m Patricia Howard. I am a photographer living in Louisville, Colorado.

My piece, “To Unknown Ancestors and the Melancholy of Ireland”, was made when I was at an artist residency at Cill Rialaig in Ballinskelligs, Ireland. During the residency, I was housed in a restored cottage on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The village at Cill Rialaig were abandoned in the 1800s when many starving Irish left the country during the Great Hunger or Irish Potato Blight. The stone buildings were more recently restored by the Irish government. During my stay, it was cold and damp and the heat was not functioning. I thought constantly of the previous residents and how it must have been a very hard place to survive with so little food, enough to cause those unknown villagers to leave their home. My own ancestors are primarily Irish and while I know little about them, I have been told they also left during the time period of the Great Hunger. Over a million Irish died from starvation as the primary crop, the potato, failed. Between one and two million emigrated during that time. I felt their unseen presence in the stone, the wind and the ocean.

“To Unknown Ancestors” was created using the cyanotype process, which was prevalent in the 1840s – the same period that the original residents of Cill Rialaig abandoned their homes. Cyanotypes are often made using sunlight to create an image of an object, in this case an infant’s dress onto chemically-coated paper. After exposing the cyanotype, I toned the image with black tea and stitched overlapping lines with embroidery thread. Tea is an essential beverage in Ireland and the stitching adds a texture and handmade quality to the cyanotype. 

I created this artwork as an expression of the unseen presence of both my own ancestors and the previous families who lived and worked in this place. I felt their existence during my time at Cill Rialaig. This piece conveys those feelings of melancholy, loss and past lives.