I have recently come back from a month-long residency at the Guesthouse Project, Cork, facilitated by Art Arcadia. My follow up digital residency, looks back and reflects on the time spent there.

I was last in Cork in 1997 with my two children, who were, at that time very young. It rained every day. Aside from the weather, I remember little of the city. On my return visit I was surprised at how vibrant, multi-cultural and hilly it is. Again, it rained almost every day.

I came to the residency with a collection of photographs from my mother’s house, taken, predominantly by my Uncle David and my mum, in the late 70s and onward. Nominally referred to as family ‘snaps’; these images, often spontaneous, without formal framing and composition, nevertheless hold a compelling potency, made all the more acute by the recent loss of my mother, my uncle and the family home.

I also took with me a number of seminal texts on photography – John Berger, Roland Barthes, Janet Malcolm (as well as raiding the Guesthouse bookshelves) to help me get to the nub of the matter – to embody the gaze of the photographer. Sometimes these helped, sometimes not – sometimes the canon gets in the way. My reading was countered, for light relief, with popular podcasts on food. I would fall asleep to tales of instant mash, cold beans, biryani and such like. The Guesthouse has a strong ethos around food – its provenance, the cooking, the sharing, the feeding – and is co-hosted by the artists Mick O’ Shea and Irene Murphy who, along with Stephen Brandes, comprise the Domestic Godless. By coincidence, the one film I went to see while I was there was Tran Anh Hung’s, The Scent of Green Papaya (1993), a slow and gentle contemplation of change – the passage of time and shifting relationships punctuated by the rituals of cooking.

These multi-faceted aspects informed, sometimes on a subliminal level, the direction the work took, along with a sense of revisiting, and reaching back while moving forward.

Bio:

Sue Morris was born in England and is a graduate of the Royal College of Art, London. Since the early nineties she has lived in Ireland, most recently in Derry, Northern Ireland. Her multidisciplinary practice utilizes drawing, text, printmaking, film, photography, sound and installation. Her work explores historical and personal narratives – the known and the unknown, real and imagined – how identity is constructed and the fallibility of memory.

Morris has been the recipient of awards from the Arts Council of N. Ireland, Culture Ireland, Dublin City Council, Derry and Strabane County Council, The Bloody Sunday Trust, ArtsEverywhere.ca and the Dementia Services Development Trust among others. She was recently awarded the Maurna Crozier Bursary.

Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows nationally and internationally including  Photophobia Festival of Contemporary Moving Image, Ontario, Canada; 16:9 Gallery, Lawrence University, Michigan, USA; Artisterium 7, Tblisi, Georgia; the Kunstverein Galerie, Vienna, Austria; the Irish Embassy, Bejiing, China and the QSS Gallery, Belfast.

In 2024 she has a forthcoming residency at the British School at Rome funded by Derry and Strabane Artist’s Award and will be showing new work at the RCC, Letterkenny.

www.suemorris.ie