Using visual and discursive forms within video technology, my practice addresses narratives of emigration, examines boundaries between personal and cultural histories, and deals with notions of home, language and other.

Turas is a video work in which linguistic and symbolic ciphers in landscape are used to trace an eroded Irish language and culture. The central signifier is the river, which extends its epic narrative function by leading not only to its physical source, but also to another, inner location, a formal interior framed in echo of traditions of portraiture.

This interior space is where the Mothervoice offers itself as an alternative, a repository of knowledge and a fund of cultural energy with which to resist the effects of displacement. In Turas, the daughter's relationship to the Mothertongue is not only gendered but predicated on a genealogical link with the maternal body. There is also an analogy between the separation from the mother and the emigrant's trauma of lost access to both language and the physical landscape.

Sheffield, England - December, 1994