Patricia McCormack: Exploring home while being unable to go there

Patricia McCormack is an Irish artist currently based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work typically explores astronomy and astrophysics through photography and painting, collage, installation and, more recently, Python code. Born in Ireland in 1988, Patricia graduated from the Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin, with a First-class Honours degree in Visual Art Practice (2011). She has exhibited her work in galleries throughout Scotland, England and Ireland.

"As we know, the UK has one of the highest death rates in Europe and was one of the last countries to enact lockdown measures. My main source of income is as a bookseller so my unessential job meant I would be placed on furlough for the forseeable. For the last two years I had been working toward a solo show back home in Ireland. This was of course cancelled once Ireland enacted a country wide lockdown, a week before the UK did. I hope it will be rescheduled, but as of right now I do not know any more information about what will happen next. I have used these last few months in lockdown to further develop the work I was due to exhibit in April.

This is not the only thing to come out of my time being housebound in the UK. Even though my flights home were cancelled I would still have been able to book another a few weeks down the initial lockdown line, as travel between the UK and Republic of Ireland was not massively restricted. However my travel was non-essential so I could not justify the journey other than wanting to be with my family, instead of being in a country that flouted herd-immunity as a good idea. It would have been remarkably irresponsible of me to go home, especially to a sibling who is immunosuppressed.

I don’t think I have ever had the time to truly dive into the 'not currently relevant' folders of photographs on my hard drive before. I have owned and used 35mm cameras for over ten years now and I would always have one with me any time I travelled. I now know that my life can be defined by a bottomless box of 35mm film, some undeveloped, some unintentionally forgotten about. And do you know what? It consistently, without fail, brings me back home.

No matter where I have been there are always several frames taken there. I came to the realization, while exploring all my scanned negatives from these past ten years, that no matter where I went with the camera, at some point in the roll of film I was at home. A roll would often last me several weeks and months, as film cameras do not promote the ‘snap-happy’ method, plus they are not cheap to process. I’d like to go home now please. But I can't. It will be several more months before I can, because if I were to do so I would be putting my family’s lives at risk. I have never been unable to go home before.

I began to pluck these images out from their respective 'Olympus', 'Expired film', '35mm cross processed' etc. folders and posted them to Instagram, some with small snippets of stories about the image, and some just saying the words 'I'd like to go home now please'. They became representations of my longing to be there and in its own way was a form of comfort. They created some really interesting conversations with others and I was proud for my peers to see the rural country life I came from.

I have been able to look at old images with fresh eyes. I’ve rediscovered their worth. One topic in particular kept returning and that was turf. I had shot many frames on the turf bog with my father, and it became a long running topic called 'Papa and the Turf.' There are currently eleven parts to the series. I feel that I am coming to the end of it but it has been a really lovely journey to my home place.

The series will be printed once the photo labs here in Edinburgh open and I will proceed from there. I know I will offer many of the images as fine art prints available to order on my Etsy store but I also know that some of the images will remain with just me. I don’t have plans yet to develop this series into an exhibition, but I think the potential is there. My work for the last five years has been concerned with astronomy and astrophysics so I love that these strange times have allowed me the space to become more personal, but equally thought provoking."

You can see more of Patricia's work on her website.

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