Flights of Remembrance

By Greg Thomas, 10.10.2022

Boathouse, Donegal © Frank McElhinney, courtesy of Street Level Photoworks

Around the four columns of Street Level’s main gallery space, thousands of names have been scrawled in graphite, spiralling over each other to form a dense tangle of lettering. These are transcribed passenger lists for sailings from Liverpool to North America during the late 19th century. Many of the emigrants would have come to Liverpool via Glasgow, and presumably from Ireland to Scotland before that, though the details of travellers in that direction during and immediately after the Great Famine of 1845-52 were not recorded. At that time, it was simply internal migration within Great Britain.

Frank McElhinney, an artist from a Glaswegian family with Irish-Catholic roots, has filled Street Level with a series of such tributes to the scores of families forced from their homes by the Famine, or who, in later years, voluntarily boarded ships to Britain facing ongoing economic hardships. This exhibition is the product of a 2019 residency exchange programme between Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow and Artlink in Donegal, and much of the photographic component of the show has been gathered on field visits to Ireland. An aerial Instax snap shows burial pits dug during 1845-48 near Skibbereen, Country Cork. A selection of 100 images shows scenes, both mundane and atmospheric, from the Atlantic coast of Ireland today: the historic setting-off point for a longer, more perilous journey than the Glasgow ferry.

There are also scenes to document closer to home. Public works projects were initiated in both Ireland and Scotland to “force starving people to work in return for a pittance of pay,” including the so-called Famine Wall over Beinn Dearg in the Highlands, one of three similar ruins captured in the ‘Relief Works’ triptych. Waterline shows construction projects in Western Scotland on which Irish immigrants were put to work. The exhibition also reflects a personal journal for the artist. A silver gelatin print shows the cracked wall of a ruined farmhouse in Donegal which his grandparents left for Glasgow in the 1870s. The concluding image, ‘Connor and Euan’, is a tender portrait of McElhinney’s sons.

A short audio-essay, ‘éist (Listen)’, offers eloquent justification for returning to the Famine at this point in our history, citing Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “angel of history,” who stares back into the past, watching the wreckage of human misery grow ever higher while being blown endlessly into the future by the storm of progress: unable to repair the wreckage. “Today,” McElhinney says, “the world is faced with climate change, conflict, and famines....that result in forced migrations....Now would be a good time to recover some of our history, and learn lessons from past mistakes.”

Frank McElhinney’s exhibition, Flight, is exhibited at Street Level Photoworks until 30 October.