sculpture abstraction quays memory interpretation
memorials leaving ireland by paul whelan
On June 8, 1847 a ship pulled into Toronto harbour with seven hundred Irish emigrants escaping the Great Hunger – the potato famine. This was the beginning of a six month inundation of over 37,000 into the small city of 20,000. Many of these people were so weakened by hunger that they became easy victims of typhoid fever. By the end of the summer over 1,100 died in the temporary fever sheds erected at King and John Streets. The largely Protestant citizenry of Toronto was remarkably generous towards the largely Catholic migrants. Many public servants administering to the immigrants contracted fever and also died over that summer. Within a year, over 98% of the surviving emigrants had moved on from Toronto to the interior of British North America or even further, into the United States. The memory of Black ‘47 quickly faded from the city’s consciousness. Much like subsequent waves of immigrants, the migration of 1847 had no impact on the physical form of the city. Toronto neighbourhoods like Kensington or Cabbagetown once had large Irish communities but there is no memory of this fact imprinted onto the city. There is no part of the city that looks like Dublin, or Shanghai for that matter. Perhaps the impulse to commemorate the arrival of of a people is given impetus by their seeming lack of imprint of on the city. Ireland Park is a commemoration of the summer of 1847. It sits at the foot of an almost impossibly powerful backdrop, the grain silos of Canada Malting. The park is conceived as simple grass field with three elements - entry wall, cylinder and sculptures.
Upon entry one is confronted by a fragmented crenellated wall of Kilkenny limestone. This wall resonates as a reference to Ireland despite the fact that there is nothing like it there. The rugged quality of the wall and the stacked stone clearly reference the Irish landscape and also the construction technique of the abandoned Irish cottages. The impossibly narrow vertical gaps between the stacked stones are engraved with most of the names of those who died in Toronto that summer. Only those sufficiently emaciated from hunger could possibly slip through the wall. We must walk around it.
On Site review 24
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