Mary Furlong
I am an Irish visual artist specialising in photography. I am interested in stories, personal living histories and local places and their hidden histories, the commonplace and the generally overlooked. I am inspired by what I find around me, everyday objects and situations, chance remarks, snippets, and stories. I look for what I think is extraordinary in the everyday and I like to work collaboratively within communities.
Flock
The global pandemic of 2020 resulted in the postponement of my original third year self-directed project. Looking around for ideas for a new project that I could do under the restrictions I consulted my many ideas notebooks, made a list, and decided to photograph my collection of birds, rubber ducks, ornaments, jewellery and so on. They were to hand and did not require travel or access to people or places. Behind the kitsch is a story about my Dad. When I was young, he had an aviary at the end of our back garden where he bred budgies and canaries. As a child I was always drawing, I only remember my Dad drawing birds in profile with a biro on the backs of used brown envelopes. I searched my Mum’s house looking for one of my Dad’s drawings but could not find any.
What Fin Told Me
This project is a brief overview of Ireland’s relationship with nuclear power during my lifetime. I was born in 1968, the same year the then government proposed a nuclear power plant to be sited at Carnsore Point in Wexford. The power station would have produced electricity for the ESB, but plans were eventually dropped after numerous government changes, oil crises and years of opposition by environmental groups. As a teenager growing up in the 80’s everything seemed overshadowed by the spectre of Sellafield. It seemed to be always in the news, there were numerous leaks and calls to shut it down. In 2019 my friend Fin told me that some of Ireland's electricity is generated by nuclear power that comes through an undersea cable from England. So, while we in Ireland do not have any actual nuclear facilities, we still have a very real everyday relationship to nuclear power.