Martina Cleary, visual artist

Recent Work / Ritual Dream of The Shaman

Recent Work / Postcards From A Life

The Blue Wind is a second cycle of work, following on from Postcards From A Life . It includes a limited edition photobook , and a series of prints build upon a narrative response to Breton's novel Nadja.

Recent Work / The Blue Wind

Recent Work / The Blue Wind - II

This series was commissioned as part of the international Procur.arte Flaneur New Urban Narratives project, including an invited residency in Lisbon in July, followed by an installation of work in Lisbon in September 2015.

Recent Work / At Night We Dreamed of Tall Ships

The suitcase as an object was found by chance in a second hand store in North London. It already had well-worn travel labels for journeys between London, Paris, and Ireland, which could easily have been my own. It was the perfect image of the memory of journeys made, and the memory of emigration. It became a device to visually represent wandering, or a sense of displacement, relevant beyond the personal and relating to historical as well as contemporary experiences. Thoughts rather than destinations were printed on travel labels to accompany images in this series.

Recent Work / The Suitcase Archive

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In 1954 the Dorothea Lange visited Co. Clare, on a six-week assignment for Life Magazine. Prior to visiting Ireland she read The Irish Countryman , a book written in 1937 by the Harvard based academic and anthropologist Conrad Arensberg.  His controversial text was based on observations made during a year of field studies in the small village of Lough in North-West Clare. During her six-week assignment, Lange shot some 2,400 images, but only nineteen of these made the final edit for Life Magazine. The remainder were buried in the archives of the Oakland Museum of California until the early 1990’s when Gerry Mullins, an Irish freelance journalist then living in San Francisco, discovered the work by chance while searching for an Irish interest item. His book Dorothea Lange’s Ireland (1998) , is the first and only overview of these images published to date. In 2006 I returned to Ireland after over a decade abroad, and settled in County Clare. I found Gerry Mullin’s book by chance and was simultaneously both drawn to and troubled by Lange’s representation of the place and its community. On one level her images are incredibly evocative, triggering memories, and an idea of the West of Ireland which is steeped in nostalgic association, interwoven with both individual and collective ideas of identity. But her images are also problematic, and have been criticized for re-presenting an idea of Irishness tied to regressive, conservative and post-colonial ideas of a place and community. The truth or fiction of the photograph, it’s ability to operate as an environment of mnemonic return, and the use of the image as a starting point to explore individual and collective ideas of memory became the focus for PhD work, based on this collection. Initial stages of the project included revisiting selected places and subjects from Lange’s work. However as the project developed, I became more interested in establishing a collaborative and relational method of working within the context I was researching. Supported by a Creating Space Grant from The Clare Arts Office,  in 2015  this included  facilitating a community based project using previously unpublished images and fieldnotes, gathered at the Oakland Museum of California, as material to navigate ideas of memory, place and belonging.  Exhibition Catalogue

Recent Work / They Glide Like Birds Single & In Groups, Over The Roads

Recent Work / Remember To Forget

Recent Work / Some Spectral Muse