. The Linen Memorial

The Linen Memorial as a creative project can help develop alternative narratives about the Northern Ireland community(ies) in our postcolonial times. It was created with Canada Council funding in early 2001, and has been exhibited in North America and Australia, and has recently travelled to Ballycastle, Northern Ireland, in 2008. My project is made of approximately 400 handkerchiefs and almost 4,000 names, dating from 1966–2000,^[4] printed and overstitched.^[5] It is a ‘living monument’ and, as such, continues to be exhibited site-specifically^[6] (or site-contextually) while the crafting process is on-going, inspiring contributions by artists/musicians/performers, and visitors/mourners who are leaving a growing collection of personal mementoes. The LM is a sculptural marker in the project of re-working a common middle ground in Northern Ireland’s communities. It is a visual arts endeavour which helps inspire pluralism and diversity; possible re-worked definitions of nationalism (nationalism used in this sense, in contemporary Irish ethnography, precludes associations with Republican/Catholic struggle). It also forms temporary spaces where fragile connections may be made.^[7] The memorial is not fixed, as in a traditional sculpture or structure, but is mobile, because a neutral site for such a project in Northern Ireland remains an impossibility.^[8]

The particular materiality of the memorial is as important as content, form and site. I chose linen because flax farming and linen manufacture were central to the industrialisation and colonisation of Northern Ireland from the later 1700s into the early twentieth century. Linen can be a reference for the universal body, so that while the units are handkerchiefs, the linen symbolically honours the wounded body with a timeless and eternal reminder of the ritual of the ancient death shroud. Hand-embroidery is time-consuming and symbolically illustrates that grieving, and dealing with the anxiety/trauma, is a protracted process. The LM claims to be a humble artwork: non-heroic in its materiality, its crafted methodology and in the manner of its presentation as an installation artwork. In my first exhibition of the LM, I entitled the work: ‘Between Worlds: The Common Body’ which asks, ‘Whatever one’s political, religious, class or ethnic background, perhaps we are all equal, and of the same community, when we die?’ The chronological listing^[9] of the names, with which this ‘living memorial’ is made possible, is derived from the book Lost Lives.^[10] An accurate chronological names list (and entries which describe the moments before each person’s death) took seasoned Belfast journalists seven years of research.^[11]

My memorial is situated in the intersection between the grief and bitterness caused by sectarian divisiveness. With the different interactive exhibitions of the LM over time, various alternative tropes of the relationship between the dead and the living are developed. These are necessary for new schemes of knowledge and social practice for the survivors and the living. It has been hung in various configurations: in a tomb-like formation (Seattle, 2001); as a mourning ritual of inverted catenary arches (Canberra, 2004); as a horizontal quilt (Wollongong, 2005). The 2002 and 2004 configurations involved two Australian collaborators: composer Tom Fitzgerald and choreographer Elizabeth Cameron Dalman and her Mirramu Dance Company. In 2002 Fitzgerald composed ‘The Seeming Insanity of Forgiveness,’ a complex sonic surround performed at The Long Gallery in Wollongong in honour of the Day of the Dead. Fitzgerald’s composition (an excerpt of which is included in this volume) also accompanied the memorial at Canberra’s Craft ACT in February 2004. Most recently the LM was hung vertically from the skylights in The Crói building at the Corrymeela Centre for Peace and Reconciliation, Northern Ireland ( www.corrymeela.org) for the first Day of Private Reflection on the conflict in Northern Ireland, 21 June 2007. At this event every name recorded in Lost Lives was read aloud (see www.dayofprivatereflection.com and www.healingthroughremembering.org).

The full listing of individual lives in the LM raises a larger aesthetic and ethical question: What effects does the inclusive list of names produce in regards to the audience/proposed audience of visitors from the general public and mourners of loved ones? As McKittrick et al., the authors of Lost Lives, state, ‘Since the deaths are listed chronologically, their sequence provides, in effect, an alternative history [as opposed to an official history] of the troubles.’^[12] When such a narrative is re-created through embroidery on linen squares it suggests that slow, recuperative work is needed to examine the failings of Northern Ireland’s past, and re-thread a hopeful sense of the future. The project works against a Northern Ireland culture where violent community relations have been the norm for the last 30 years. The memorial attempts to create spaces where a delicate ‘parity of esteem’ can be held, even temporarily, between individuals and groups of differently-perceived backgrounds in contemporary Northern Ireland, emerging from conflict.