Chomh milis le mil | Isabella Koban at The Black Box

Event Details

“Chomh bán le bainne /Chomh milis le mil / Chomh dearg le fuil.”
as white as milk/ as sweet as honey / as red as blood . (trans.)

(NFC, 0023 : 190)

(Anna Ní Fhathaigh, School’s Collection, Duchas c. 1920s. )

Joyce says that the soul of Ireland is trapped in a net; it is also collected there. To create ourselves we must reach into that fishing net, that lacework, that woven basket. Do our fingers catch in the gaps?

Owing a great debt to the scholarship of Martín Mac Con Iomaire, Bríd Mahon, Kevin Danaher, Jennie Moran and the thousands of voices woven into the Dúchas Schools collection, my art practice explores and reimagines the patchwork history of cooking culture in Ireland. It does so in the hopes of easing a painful cultural memory of famine, fasting, hunger strikes, institutionalization and food insecurity, which today manifests in the prevalence of disordered eating and Ireland’s disregard for the nutritional needs of those in our care.

Drawing on the aforementioned scholarship, persevering folklore, medieval Irish literature, traditional craft methods (patchworking, Irish lace, delft ceramics), as well as my love of cooking with my friends, the work develops a joyful visual language for Irish cooking. The artistic outcomes of my research into food history tend to root themselves in Irish craft traditions, such as Irish lace crochet, quilting and weaving, underscoring the idea that Irish cooking deserves to be revived with the same significance in our culture as the aforementioned crafts.

The exhibition opening will feature hand-drawn looping animations showing step-by step instructions of how to cook some traditional regional dishes which have fallen out of the culture as a result of colonisation, famine, etc.,

Knowing the level of destruction to people and culture caused by orchestrated famine, in Ireland historically and now as it happens in Gaza, I believe in the significance of reconstructing our food culture in a way which contradicts the individualistic and destructive philosophy of colonization. If the art of colonization is line and boundary, our art must be holding, gathering, sharing.