Prints and Traces
Catherine Marshall
2017
Every individual and every family has secrets. Indeed it seems that every nation has them too. In the case of 20th century Ireland, far too many of our private and collective secrets have to do with incarceration, hiding a family member with a mental illness, or tuberculosis, secreting unmarried mothers in Magdalene homes, erasing the name of a loved one because their distinguishing quality seemed to threaten the respectability of the rest of the family.
Margo McNulty has spent years delving into the traces left behind in abandoned houses on Achill Island where her ancestors lived. The island itself is a kind of archive; its very remoteness served to preserve the signs of histories that modernism obliterated elsewhere. Her principal medium - print-making - parallels the process of history itself. There is something of the detective about the way in which she studies what are often nearly indecipherable traces of those ancestral lives. There is also something very topical, at this age of alternative facts, about the way she goes back to the original sources – where they exist- to find truth and her insistence on the use of photography and photoetching, as a witness to the real facts.
Like many Irish families, hers was divided in its political allegiances. In his twenties, Eneas McNulty was interned as a Republican at the Curragh Camp, from June 1940 until he was released on medical grounds in May 1943, only to die of tuberculosis a short time later. Some of the family who lived on in Achill and worked for the state found it difficult to speak of him or to include him in the family narrative. But science proves that there are always traces. The artist was curious about a number of objects made by prisoners; devotional crosses and nationalist symbols made from animal bone and matchsticks in the Folk Life Museum in Castlebar. The fact that the makers’ names had been erased, perhaps deliberately by donor relatives who did not want to be associated with that history, echoed her family’s experience. McNulty is proud of a Celtic cross made of matchsticks by her grand-uncle Eneas, during his internment. She went to the museum at the Curragh Camp and the military archive and traced the remains, no more than trenches in the ground, of the old tin huts used to house IRA internees. The prints she made of them are stark and powerful, pitted and marked like the landscape itself. But more moving are the letters about her uncle that she had to go to the military archive to find. These include her great grandmother’s, poignant, poetic letter, “we have no one to work or make any spring.”
The letters also highlight other reasons for secrecy. A letter of 1940 notes that the army could find no trace of insanity either in the young internee himself or in his family. Later the letters show him seriously ill from ‘pleurisy with effusion’, a euphemism for the tuberculosis that was soon to kill him. The family was not alone in feeling the indignity of having your sanity examined, or fearing association with an unspeakable disease as well as political disaffection, in a world where Free State jobs were often the only protection against outright poverty.
The old family home is itself an archive, as is the remaining tin building in the Curragh Camp. They, and the papers and objects they contain, speak of repressed ideals, conflict and longing. The importance McNulty accords to the house is subtly reinforced, and given a measure of universality through images of childlike representations of home by Germans prisoners in the Curragh during the war and re-creations of the apartment of two of the leading revolutionaries in Museo de la Revolucion, Havana. Together they speak of the power of art (whether the folk art of the prisoners or the accomplished prints of the professional artist) to transcend the immediate and to break the silence of generations. These printed images make their hidden lives and suppressed longings visible. They give history itself a voice.