A beautiful promo video for the I Love Irish festival in Dublin, October 2012, shot by my good friend Mark Verling! You might remember Mark from these images I took of him earlier this year.
In my final review this week, I was asked what I thought being here for two terms had done for me- how my experience differed from those who’ve only been here since January, why I chose to stay. The Autumn was all about myself as an Artist, capital A. The Spring has been entirely about me as a person, me as a human. I didn’t have any idea what I was walking back into when I came back in January. I almost didn’t- I wanted to be home, I wanted to be around people that knew me, that knew my story.
The hardest part of any kind of travelling is connecting to the places and the people that you encounter along the way. Once you spend enough time bouncing around hostels bunks and floors and couches, you learn how to distill yourself down to a few key facts. Washington DC, 21, photographer, student. Everything becomes one big game of “Two Truths and A Lie”. You learn how much you need to share to feel like you’re a real person, to feel like you’re experiencing something meaningful.
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about how each person with whom I’ve shared this experience has impacted my last four months. More than one person last night, in the midst of teary goodbyes, thanked me for being “the mother hen”. People that I hadn’t thought I’d had an impact on, people that I hadn’t necessarily gotten to know particularly well. A lot of my friends at home would take offense to this- but regardless of how anyone meant it, I don’t. Taking care of the people around me has always been important to me- maybe because of how I was raised, maybe because of my personality, maybe because I’ve always felt like a big sister without any younger siblings. One of my biggest faults is that I will always try to be what other people need, regardless of what I myself might actually want out of a situation.
It starts to wear on a person, being what other people need. I’ve been better lately about establishing those boundaries, but especially when I need something to focus on, it’s easier to just focus on other people. Not taking care of myself, not speaking up for myself, not making my feelings known- I’ve fallen down too hard in too many situations in the last year to allow those sort of things to go on any longer. The last nine months have been the hardest, most beautiful, saddest, most enlightening, most emotionally wrought months of my life, and I am thankful now for so many things that have come out of them.
So, in my last two weeks, I have the following to say regarding my time in Ballyvaughan:
Cheers to you, Ireland. Cheers to the Burren, and the shores of Galway Bay. Cheers to good pints, good food and good people. Cheers to running away from our problems, to solving most of them anyway, and to finding kindred spirits in unexpected places. Cheers to tea with milk and sugar. Cheers to the craic. Cheers to Fanore Beach in September and swimming in all our clothes, to setting fire to our baggage (literally and metaphorically), to allowing people into your heart without knowing at all if they’ll break it. Cheers to broken hearts. Cheers to forgetting (and being forgotten). Cheers to knit scarves, warm boots and full bellies, to a full week of sunshine and clear skies. Cheers to the rain. Cheers to soft days and soft bodies and to sharing your bed at night. Cheers to missed buses and kind souls. Cheers to accents, and to slang. Cheers to the wind. Cheers to stray cats, stray dogs and lives gone astray- to love and love lost and no love lost at all. Cheers to clean sheets on gray mornings. Cheers to the night sky (when we could see it). Cheers to watching the sun start the day by set the sky aflame on no sleep at all. Cheers to departures, to blank white walls and recycling bins full of regret. Cheers to last drinks and last letters and last moments together.
Cheers to you, Ireland. Cheers to the Burren.
When you opt to exist entirely in a community that is not your own, you need to learn to respect the traditions of that society. We are here solely at the sheer grace of the village, and consistently butting heads with influential people is not doing anyone any favors. You are ruining this chance for everyone who comes after you, in addition to perpetuating an awful stereotype of ethnocentricity in Americans.
Quit it.
I made edits to that zine that I published a couple months ago. I’m not going to charge for this one so if you want one, leave me a message here or on fb or wherever. If you’re outside of Ireland I might wait until I get home to send it to you/hand it to you in person- but if you’d rather get international mail, let me know. And maybe possibly consider dropping a dollar or two in my PayPal account? equimby@gmail.com. Not necessary if you can’t/don’t feel like it, but post is expensive and I’m kind of down to the wire money-wise (which is why I haven’t sent many postcards this term, in case you were wondering).
Martina told me last night, in Greene’s, after a few drinks, that she thinks I’ve really found my voice. That she’s really going to miss me. That I’m her girl. I’ve never been so flattered or endeared. I’m really going to miss her, too.
I scrapped the social media aspect of my portrait project. Fuck it, man. I’d forgotten entirely why I wanted to start shooting people in the first place- I was trying so hard to put ~~sUbStANcE~~ into my work this term that I’d forgotten the substance it had to begin with. I’m happy with it.
The Kids Are Alright, 2012
from september 2nd, 2011 until april 20, 2012 i attended the burren college of art in ballyvaughan, ireland. at home, i am a third-year student in a 5-year BFA-photo/MA-teaching program.
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