Maitiú Mac Cárthaigh

Presented during my master's graduation show from the KABK, this work is a suspended installation of gelatine leather, agri-business incubation lamps and steel pipes along with two tv screens displayed on the floor. In this work I am recreating a memory of being inside a septic tank as a child. Within the tank, runoff is purified and stillborn bandhs (piglets), present on the screens, are broken down by microbes. The tank's exterior is lined with pig leather as it falls away from it's original circular form. As light leaves the screens it reflects off each membrane, slowly dissolving. It is a space where everything is homogenised. The tank acts as the end point for all productivity.

detail shot of gelatine leather.

second view of installation.

One day you shall only speak to the bees (ODB) aims to create a topographical survey of queer Irish-ness. The work is written as autobiographical ficto-criticism. ODB is a piece drawing on the formalities of the Artist Novel and Topographica Hibernica (written in 1188 c.e). This work links the ascension of Irish-ness into whiteness and the E.U. with output driven agricultural terraforming as commentary on the sexual politics of isolated populations, white/queer guilt, Irish neo-liberal economics and rural gentrification.

Video work expanded on from previous exhibition in Nest earlier in 2022.

Letter installed in window of PnF. “It Smells Like a Village” comes from a memory of my father teaching me how to keep a domestic septic tank healthy. The text follows a recipe like a sourdough starter; but this fermenting mother prefers to gobble up things such as dead piglets. Alongside images of dark pits, roadkill, and sewage, the reader is brought along the emotional connection to rural scenes, which might feel grotesque for some, but familiar and mundane for others. Can a realistic image of rural existence be portrayed in this way as an act of bringing together? Text printed on window "To keep the waste treatment tank healthy, you have to feed it like a starter. Bleach used in toilets kills the bacteria in its belly and it takes even longer to restart the cycle of fermentation once the damage has been inflicted. A friend’s mother uses dead crows. My uncle is never very specific on the species but needs the body to be good and rotten. My father always brings home a still born banbh. To feed it, go out the back door and open the cement lid. Taking care to not let it drop on your fingers. Then slowly lower the banbh into the darkness. Back into a warm, chamber for it to nourish, in place of being nourished. The flashes I have of this memory are scattered - at best. One half sees a white yard light that pierces through a rainy night, and I am standing still.The other is a so  night filled with torches leading the way to the hole. Both end in front of the fire. At the distance where it can enter your body and spread through you like syrup. Not too close and not too far and I am melting into sleep. Gooey under the flickering incubation bulb. Now, I have reached the correct temperature and am now digesting the carpet, exposed stone walls and delicious glow."

In swimming in grey water (2022), I recreate the scene of agricultural production through appropriated materiality and desktop documentary. Participants were asked to feed septic tanks with straw and slop while using 90cm AI gloves. I am connecting historical cyclical materiality of agriculture to contemporary high output demands through the act of penetration and waste management. These two processes exist worlds apart yet in this moment, perception is shifted to question extractive farming techniques.

"I felt as if I could only lay flat on my back on my bed, stretched out in all directions. Wearing the same little as possible for much too long. Having taken to the bed, I am unable to do much of anything while I sweat a shower of stillness into my already soaked sheets. There is a boiling in my head – things have gone well beyond a simmer. And this is that good summer they will speak about for years and years. Outside my window, the greenery perspires at the same rate as I do. Together, we sweat like pigs in a small stuffy shed. Except I choose not to rehydrate, the poor grass stands no chance. If I am still enough, I can hear its sizzling waft in through my ever-open window on the few and far between gusts of wind. I think it is time to get up Matt, the day’ll be gone soon. But it is only three in the afternoon? There are still so many hours of sunlight left. And I purposely sabotage my rhythms of sleep as it numbs my nerves but makes my skin more sensitive to the heat and the cold stickiness of dried in sweat. What does a drought even look like on a rock like this one? When did we ask the Sun down to murder our cows and burn our grass and kill our profits and demand changes in the CAP? But isn’t the weather only gorgeous? I’m barely out in it, but even a hint of sunlight supercharges me. It’s not as if I have ever bathed in it much but as it melts and murders the outside, I feel like like a solar panel. Charging up my batteries just to waste this renewable on Instagram. That summer, I smelt rank. My body was some form of damp and rotting swamp creature attempting to hide from the sun on this baking rock that was once a rainforest. I was the bog body I had always dreamed of becoming. In my folds and around my holes, a utopia of bacteria exists – warmed and kept alive by the perspiring of my skin. They loved to live there and hated a wash, but the body needed it. The pools of moisture like lakes, surrounded and separated by crusts of filth. Accumulated over millennia. Inundated with – wet, The wells will soon run dry. And when the first drizzle comes, maybe I will dance in it. Until then, this good summer will continue well into September.

(BA graduation work) This work is concerned with constructing alternative agricultural spaces, derived from the rural landscape and decaying architecture of Ireland, spaces that I can inherit and inhabit. My place within this landscape is uneasy as I grew up as the eldest or “right son” on a farm but never inherited due to fire. Further to this I also exist outside the heteronormative ideal of agricultural life. Within these works, I create spaces that examine ideas of labour, land ownership, male dominance, agriculture and lack of Queer identity. As the Farm Labourer, I actively engage within the systems of labour and production. This work actualises these processes of agricultural labour within the context of the gallery. Presented as an expanded print- based practice, with a central focus on the performative act of making, this work sits within an auto-ethnomethodological framework that focuses on the moment of making and acts as the fulcrum of practice. This fulcrum or pivot point conceptually link my research with my making and highlights the didactic nature of my work.

Different angle shot of show.