Thursday, November 1, 2012

A curious combination of crackpots,crags,crocs and curraghs


While attending the Feile Na Gcloch on Inis Oírr with Tomas Lipps I happened to meet the mayor of Galway who had showed up to be in part of the TG4 documentary they were doing about the festival and the dry stone workshops that were being held on the island last September.

I happened to have a prize 'head' of cabbage (Irish - cabáiste) in my hands at the time too.

Cabbages like this prize one, and many other vegetables, were for a long time impossible to grow on the Aran Islands because of the rocky craggy terrain and harsh winds there. 

Over many years the local farmers built what is now an amazing a network of dry stone walls and enclosures over much of the island, and then spreading sand and seaweed over the bedrock, many new arable areas were created . The walls surrounding each tiny field help stop most of this new soil from blowing away. 

--------------------------------------------

By merely changing the scale and 'dublin' the lines a bit, I had this idea to show how the craggy bedrock pattern (in the original b & w photo I took of Inis Oírr ) curiously morphs into a fairly believable larger landscape of new walls and fields on the island. 




An example of Inis Oírr an inverse fractal perhaps?