Deep History, Deepening Collaborations

“With new documents being uploaded regularly to the Virtual Record Treasury I have spent time examining maps of Ireland (currently 6,000 to choose from), magnifying the details, close- ups, zooming in and out”. 46 The Nick of Time Becoming the Archive Mairéad McClean, Decade of Centenaries Artist in Residence This year I have been thinking a lot about the material difference between archives that are hands-on, what we now call ‘in real life’, and the digitized doppelgangers at our fingertips. What relation is a paper-based archive? Genealogically, is it a brother or a sister or a first cousin twice removed. I wonder about taking the body out of the archival experience. And without taking in the particular smell of an archival repository, changing that sensual encounter, will I miss this powerful indicator of what it means to be human. The writer Kathryn Burns writes that ‘archives are not static arsenals of information, but sites in which a variety of contemporary and later actors have exercised and negotiated agency, identity and power.’ So, it makes sense to me that the vibrations within this body of books and documents still moves, still pulses with life, online or not. With new documents being uploaded regularly to the Virtual Record Treasury I have spent time examining maps of Ireland (currently 6,000 to choose from), magnifying the details, close-ups, zooming in and out. I am drawn to the finely drawn lines that represent the depth and height of the land mass, and wrap around the coastline like waves. I picture them lapping back and forth and hear sounds of the sea in my ear. I find myself looking at an Ordnance Survey map from 1899 and notice the coastline around Portrush in Northern Ireland. It looks exactly like a tooth, roots and all! As my eyes wander around, I realise the Giant’s Causeway is nearby and a story from childhood of a fight between Finn McCool and the Scottish giant (The Red Man) on its basalt columns comes back to me. The legend goes that to distract her husband’s rival, McCool’s wife, Sadhbh, feeds the red giant an oatcake so hard it makes him lose some of his teeth and run back to Scotland. In the map of Portrush I look at on my computer screen - it is not the topography of the area I see but one of the Red Man’s teeth! I colour it red to signify a sore tooth, the Red Man’s tooth pulsating with the Red Man’s blood. My childhood memory mixes with my adult musings to make the past and the present collide in front of my eyes, to make a new image appear with its history attached. Right: The Red Man’s Tooth: Hachured Ordnance Survey of Ireland, 1899 | LBC OS2/5 | Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, Digital tint, Mairéad McClean, 2023©