by Eoin McGarvey
‘Cuimhní na Coigríche’ (Migration Memories), a new solo exhibition by Moira Mc Iver exploring the history of migration between Donegal and Glasgow, has opened at An Gailearaí, Gaoth Dobhair.
Born in Scotland and living between Donegal and Northern Ireland, Moira has spent her life crossing borders. Migration Memories derives from a series of art projects developed since the 1980s, originally based on archival documents and family photographs.
The subsequent projects have used a range of media from large-format film cameras to digital scanners.
These artworks explore the experience of migration between Donegal and Glasgow from the 1920s to the present day, and how this shapes a sense of identity, particularly from a female perspective.
Moira has focused on recent generations of her family, including her mother who migrated at the age of sixteen, from Donegal to Glasgow in 1945, with Gaelic as her first language. Through the exploration of historical photographic traditions including studio portraiture and the box brownie snapshot, she attempts to reframe these experiences from a contemporary perspective.
The recent artworks developed from an exchange residency between Artlink Donegal and Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow in 2021.
During the residency Moira spent time interviewing individuals in Glasgow and Donegal whose families have undergone similar migration experiences, collating stories and photographs and visiting locations with historical or personal significance.
She was interested in how individual memory becomes a collective experience and has produced a series of landscape and cityscape photographs which explore ideas around ‘displacement’ using furniture, photo textiles and objects in the landscape.
The exhibition brings together projects from 1980-2023 in a body of work reflecting on the magnetic pull between people and place and the continuing flow of generations back and forth across the Irish Sea.
The exhibition will then run until Friday, December 8 at An Gailearaí, Páirc Ghnó Ghaoth Dobhair, F92 PT38.
Opening hours are 11am – 5pm on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, with slightly later times on Wednesday, from 1pm-8pm.
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