The quote in the title is from a Colum Cille poem, translated by James Carney.

During my residency, I explored the sense of longing for a homeland that is Ireland, captured from the viewpoint of a non-ethnically-Irish Irish person (if that makes sense). There are many narratives of longing for Ireland from afar, I wanted to find a medieval artist who wrote about it, as a starting point alongside a medieval artist that is linked to my ethnicity. So my starting point was Colum Cille and Yehuda Halevi.

During my stay in Iceland at Korpúlfsstaðir I kept a visual diary exploring how their forms of longing impact how I think of Ireland from afar. I also explored my thoughts and concepts of Ireland, towards an inevitable construction of an imagined/folkloric Ireland that would exist in my longing mind.

But, again, it would be a different concept of "Ireland", where I do not belong ethnically (and in many other ways), where I live in a city, not near green rolling hills.

The outcome for the Open Studios exhibition is a diary notebook and 4 short single channel video installations (one of which projected onto water-colour treated glass), put together to create a space in the Ratljós "open studios" exhibition space.

My residency is funded by the European Union, implemented through the Goethe-Institut via the Culture Moves Europe scheme, and for that I am thankful.