Tír na nÓg
Carved and charred salt, blown glass. 2023
Ranging in size, approx. 12” x 15” x 10”
Tír na nÓg is the ancient Irish underworld. It is also known as the Otherworld, which might be a better way to understand it, as “underworld” often invokes negative connotations for members of contemporary Christianized society, many who are accustomed to thinking of the subterranean as a linear space of hell, fear, and punishment. In ancient Irish mythology, the opposite is true: the Otherworld is a place of unusual paradise, a parallel dimension populated by a variety of supernatural beings in a setting similar to our own natural landscapes. In death, the body of earth is not transcended into some purified, cloudy heaven; it becomes more fully saturated, more vivid, more pleasurable. The textures, spaces, and processes of nature are heaven already.
Although this supernatural Otherworld is inhospitable to living humans, human spirits coexist with the Sidhe there (the latter is also known as the ’Silent Moving Folk’ as they are said to exist invisibly in a parallel dimension to ours, always coexisiting alongside us in nature). Some say that humans die and become the Sidhe, a version of what we know in contemporary mythology as faeries or elemental spirits.
The entrances to the underworld are accessed through the physical landscape and its phenomena: thorough a portal of mist, a burial mound, a swampy bog. Or on the light that glitters on the sea from the sun, known as the Honey Path. This series of salt and glass uses color that shifts in different intensities of light; color that swirls and mixes in states of transformation, offering glimpses of otherworldly phenomena and it’s shapes.
