Ghost Prints

EDITION

2025, Winner

school

MTU Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork, Ireland

links

@annacavenagh ↗
annacavenagh.com ↗

This body of work is grounded in research about my family. My great-grandmother emigrated to Australia from Ireland in 1900, at the age of 18. I closed that loop by returning to Ireland to study at 20. Though this work I was able to explore my own relationship to the Irish landscape. Growing up in Australia, European landscapes were the locations of fairy tales and were completely divorced from the land I grew up in. When I came to Ireland, I began to question this sanitised and postcard ready view of Ireland. I came to understand that the Irish environment was a product of colonialism. Under English occupation 99% of Irish forests were cut down. The Irish landscape that I idealised as a child was, in fact, a locus of colonial power. I took photos of the land surrounding my house. Half of the images were of idealised landscapes; the others were of the aftermath of contemporary logging. I produced photographic prints that were sublimated onto Japanese mulberry paper. This process created very delicate, dreamlike, distant prints.