One day while visiting my mother, I walked along the northern curve of Dublin Bay, dividing it into 52 images to capture a personal sense of architecture, landscape and the rhythm the sea. This journey, the walk, personal. Me, revisiting a place-home I left 33 years ago, returning as both a tourist and someone deeply connected to it. As a child, Dublin Bay was my playground, a place rich in history—both ancient and modern. These are not images of remoteness, or conventional beauty. Dublin’s coastline is neither remote nor spectacular. It is the coastline of a port city. By condensing and fragmenting both the architecture and the seascape, I sought to create an intimate portrayal of the whole. These fragments reflect my personal experience of the bay, capturing its essence through 56 unedited images, 700 plaster casts of shells, along with five pendulums marking time, moving back and forth, as I move back and forth, past and present melding on the sea shore. Together, they formed a mosaic, a taking apart, reimagining, and finding new meanings in both objects and memories. I start at Hollybrook Road and Clontarf Road and look across at the oil storage tanks — both a physical structure and a symbol of Dublin’s dynamic relationship with the sea, trade, and the people who pass through it. It anchors this journey, a journey I have taken countless times before, each time finding new meaning in the endless interplay of place and time. And stories of movement — people arriving, departing, and shaping the life of this place. These layers of history are not immediately apparent in the photographs, yet they are deeply embedded in the landscape. I stop at every second lamp post and take a picture, till I can see Martello Tower Forts at Red Rock Sutton Creek and Howth Head.
For anyone interested in history, Clontarf Road offers a fascinating history. As I walk along looking out onto the Irish Sea, behind me layers history of wars, class, religion, occupation and finally independence are etched into the built environment. I know these streets well. I walked them for seven school years, the battles fought there from the invading Vikings to the English Black and Tans. My friends and I fought the Battle of Clontarf on our way home from school, and on Dollymount Beach in the summer, taking turns at being Brian Boro, King of Ireland who vanquished the Vikings, such innocent times.
I start in the morning and meander around the bay, in total I take 78 photographs. It is a slow lazy walk, interrupted by rain. a stop for lunch, a coffee, and memories.
Anne O’Callaghan
43 on site review 46 :: travel
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