Song of Amergin, Multiple installations at the Hambidge Center, Rabun Gap, GA, 2019; Klaus Von Nichtsaggend in New York, NY, 2019; and 544 Park Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 2019

This work grew out of my interest in the “The Song of Amergin” – what is considered to be the “first Irish poem.” The poem is an incantation that the druid and bard Amergin Glúingel is said to have uttered on a ship to invoke the spirit of Ireland before landing on the coast of the land to conquer the Tuatha Dé Danann.

As a way to think through this poem, I constructed a series of dyed and painted panels of semi-sheer cotton muslin which I combined to form quilt-like paintings. I made a painting for each line of the poem – a total of 12 works based on 12 “I Am” lines. Each line begins as an “I am” (the poem goes “I am a stag: of seven tines/ I am a flood: across a plain/ I am a wind; on a deep lake…”), and as such, traces a different iteration of an “I.”

I was interested in how “The Song of Amergin” both serves as an origin story for the Irish identity – being this purportedly original utterance, original representation – an identity that is invoked emphatically as an all-consuming “I” – and at the same time suggests an identity that appears to radically slip, slide, dissolve. What Muldoon describes as a kind of “promiscuous provenance,” remarking on Amergin’s “tireless reinvention of himself as stag or flood or wind or howl,” and his explicit self-identification with threshold itself as an “unhewn dolmen arch.” One could say the poem is thus itself a symptom of liminality.

Overall, my project became a work that has to do with the fragment, the non-unified, the changeable, the misaligned, the fixed and unfixed, the possibility of rearrangement, the gesture as opposed to the thing, something in flux. The work is a piecemeal conglomeration that is not nameable as a singular whole because its parts refuse to come into alignment. Each of these units is the body of Amergin – by virtue of that, it investigates being. Each individual panel within the painting (there are twelve panels per painting, per “I” iteration) becomes the thing describes (wave, plant, boar, sun, etc.). But each iteration — a summoning — of the thing, is also limited and curtailed by positionality. As Donna Haraway writes, "Subjectivity is multidimensional; so, therefore, is vision."

Change, double-ness, how things stay the same and how things change. What is a thing? When does it become a thing and when does become an un-thing? When does the noun become the noun, when does the noun turn into a verb or an adjective? Nameable state with discrete borders (difference first), then sameness.