Loose Ends

Exhibition at Kerlin Gallery , Dublin of Loose Ends, a two-screen video installation and related photographic works.

Loose Ends turns our attention to the passage of time and its powerful, corrosive effect on our hopes, beliefs and sense of identity. Across two screens, Doherty uses the camera and spoken word to focus on the details and textures of two very different locations. Both associated with the 1916 Easter Rising – a key event in the history of Irish independence, the sites are examined in detail through the use of a slow, almost trance-like, zoom. Doherty’s lens absorbs the material evidence of each location today, 100 years after the events of 1916, asking whether a residual response to these events continues to be played out, or how the voices and actions of one generation and the ‘vapours of the past’ resonate in the unconscious of another.

The work was filmed on Dublin’s Moore Street and Donegal’s Gola Island. Moore Street, the site of the Rising’s final headquarters and ultimate surrender, remains strongly associated with the historical event. Gola Island’s connection to the Rising is more tangential and overlooked, though hindsight helps us to connect these places and events, as it was two fishermen from Gola who in 1914 docked at Howth, Co. Dublin and offloaded a consignment of guns and ammunition that would subsequently be used in the Rising. Doherty’s immersive two-screen installation and related photographic diptychs echo some of the dualities, contradictions and connections between the two locations: urban and rural, East and West, ideology and myth, failure and decay, the remembered and the forgotten, the visible and the absent.

The Exhibition is accompanied by the diptychs Loose Ends I , II , IV and VI.