Swanlight

The image I shared here is from a place that is like a portal for me. It’s Dublin Airport, my threshold of coming ‘home’, and leaving to go ‘home’.

This space took my breath away when I first walked through, probably in 2018. I found the photos recently, the ones I’d taken because I was mesmerized by the colour. Then it dawned on me, that the words are of the poem Swanlight by John O’Donohue, the well known and much beloved Irish poet and philosopher.

My new work called Swanlight I, II & 3 is inspired by my ongoing experience of travelling through that corridor. The airport is a place of the first welcome and last goodbye  for millions of people every year and has been a threshold of my own for 30 years, this corridor is one of the art installations at the airport which immerses passengers in experiences of Ireland as they pass through.

It has become a sacred place for me as place of transition connecting the places I call home, connecting and holding my longing, and this is what drives how I live and create around me.

“There is some strange sense in which distance and closeness are sisters, the two sides of the one experience. Distance awakens longing; closeness is belonging. Yet they are always in a dynamic interflow with each other. When we fix or locate them definitively, we injure our growth…When longing dies, creativity ceases. The arduous task of being a human is to balance longing and belonging so that they work with and against each other to ensure that all the potential and gifts that sleep in the clay of the heart may be awakened and realized in this one life’s.”

~ John O Donoghue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong