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Maria Kerin

Sweet Bellharbour

Sweet Bellharbour was a temporary artwork carried out in the community of Bellharbour, Co. Clare where the artist was born and raised.

The title of the work comes from a song written by the artist’s great grand aunt and refers to a sense of community feeling that is still strong in the area. Kerin's next-door neighbour Jack Daly would regularly sing the song -he "had made the song his own". His death in tragic circumstances was part motivation for the work. The artist chose to address his death head-on by commemorating all of the people from the community who had died during her own lifetime.

She visited all 52 houses in the parish of Bellharbour and explained her ideas for the project; with only two exceptions, every household in the parish agreed to participate. The artist recorded interviews with one or two people from each house and asked them to name people who had died. Some gave a straightforward list of names; others went into great detail remembering people, their characteristics, their connections and so on. It became a huge outpouring of love, grief, sorrow and pleasure – older women remembered babies they had lost, young people spoke of friends who had died unexpectedly, people spoke of deceased relatives and so on. Many people wanted to remember " deceased neighbours who nobody remembers now". This became a significant layer to the project - the unknown, the silent, the invisible link with community and the past revealing itself through the work.

The artist converted these recordings to a sound-work of approximately an hour’s duration.

She also took 49 white cotton sheets and embroidered the name of one individual on each, in silver thread; these were hung in a triangular field in Bellharbour for a period of two weeks in the summer of 2005; the sound-work was played over a tannoy system from sunrise to sunset each day.

It was a hugely risky piece. The work was always riding a fine line between insensitivity on the one hand and sentimentality on the other; handled badly, it had the potential to cause hurt and even harm to the local community. It was not without controversy; the artist was approached by a number of people who had grave misgivings about her intentions, and some pressure was put on her to stop.

However, despite the difficulties, the installation went ahead, and for its duration the field was thronged with visitors, locals and tourists alike. Estimates place the number of people who visited the site of the work between 1,500 and 2,000; this included many, many local people who would never dream of setting foot in a gallery, and some couldn’t see how the piece was art, but all listened with profound attention to the sound work as they sat amongst the rows of sheets, and came back to do so on many occasions.

I believe that this project depended for its success on the deep trust and respect that existed between the artist and the community, built up over the course of the artist’s lifetime. A graduate of DIT, Kerin ran a contemporary art gallery in Bellharbour for a number of years. She had run a very generous programme through her gallery, providing free access to a variety of cultural events for the local community as well as activities for children. This generosity is characteristic of Kerin's approach and is another contributing factor to the success of the work in my assessment.

Fiona Woods