An Equivocal Presence the Doherty House by Tomas de Paor Elizabeth Shotton
l ittered in the tens of thousands across the Irish landscape, seemingly abandoned at random in farmers’ fields, are overgrown partially built figures of widely varying dimension known as faerie forts, or raths as the Irish would have it, ubiquitous and in obvious states of neglect. Now understood as defensive fortifications dating from 400-1000 AD, this very ordinary construction acquired an affiliation with the faeries, referred to in Irish during the medieval period as the Tuatha dé Danaan , the people of the other world; an affiliation so enduring that it survives in contemporary Irish culture and compelling enough to ensure the continued presence of these artifacts. For though a handful of these structures have been excavated, rebuilt and preserved to be re- presented to the public and most tellingly the tourist population, the vast majority remain irrevocably entangled in the fabric of the common landscape pushing aside field boundaries, cultivation patterns and even road systems with their defiant presence [fig 1].
The interest of these forts is the capacity of ordinary artifacts to inspire such imaginative leaps of imagination through the process of association and, equally, the fluidity of connective tissue created between things past and things present. They are complex constructions indeed to achieve such feats, yet truly ordinary in both material and contextual terms. The contemporary interest in the ‘complexity of the ordinary’, a term coined by the Smithsons many years ago, is rife with contradictions as the ‘ordinary’ by its very nature is something we are deeply familiar with, part of a perceptual field firmly established, which enables us to overlook its particularity and poignancy. But these humble and neglected artifacts manage to achieve presence through a form of equivocation which demands resolution in our minds, leading to associations and speculations, no matter how seemingly fanciful. Thus to speak of the ‘ordinary’ or the everyday, is to embroil oneself in a discussion of the nature of perception and understanding. For what we, as designers, contend with is not simply the physical reality of a place but equally the contextual field of associations and memories which can be evoked. The complex web of associations contained within our mental landscape influences how the physical world is experienced and the varied meanings this experience will have for each of us. How then to reveal the complexity of the place, or the ‘ordinary’ and familiar, to imbue particularity into the not very particular? One means is to extend its imaginative context, which is the range of associations one intuitively experiences when engaging with the object. But to achieve this one must forgo the desire for clarity or intelligibility that work against the expansion of the imaginative context.
figure 1. a ringfort 1
These curious structures survive due to the mythology attached to them as equally as the mythology survives because of their resolute yet equivocal presence. Their equivocality seems key here as the tidied, re-presented versions of the ring fort, offered up comprehensively with fully developed and possibly more authoritative histories attached, have generally expunged any associations with the faerie myths. Only their less valued, less accessible kindred, neglected and overgrown, remain rooted in mythological association. The faerie myths are in truth a mutation of the much older Celtic lore of the dead, more properly associated with cairns, translated to the neglected and overgrown rath when their former use had fallen from common memory. It is a forgetfulness that enabled their presence to become sufficiently ambiguous to precipitate unlikely associations, to enable a more active imaginative engagement through conjecture. A process that likely saved both rath and historic religious beliefs from complete extinction and transformed the ordinary into the extraordinary.
22
on | site 16
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator