An artist travels to a small island to be better immersed in the colonised minority language, and is met by a dead crane and an Irish-speaking, shape-shifting horse.
The horse engages the artist in a teasing conversation on family legacy, the fallacy of books, neolithic inscriptions, burial, ancestral anxieties, colonial violence and contemporary housing crisis politics. In this work, a home takes many forms, including the scaffolding for learning and preserving language.
This installation draws on my work on voicing’s self-determining potential, and how learning Irish became a practice to further understand (but then in reality further confuse) the responsibilities of white settler identities and the inheritance of colonial silencing.
Jacqui Shelton, Bím Caillte (mistranslated: I am, usually, habitually, lost), 2023, digital video still