On 16 March 2017, Eamonn Doyle’s mother, Kathryn, died. His brother, Ciarán, had died suddenly at age 33 in 1999 and their mother had never managed to escape the grief of this time reversal in the order of things. Throughout the 18 years from Ciarán’s death to her own, Kathryn wrote letters to her dead son, talking directly to him. Eamonn began layering images of these letters on top of each other like stratified ordnance maps or sound compositions that now appear to describe some kind of seismic evidence.
With K, Eamonn moves away from Dublin to Connemara at the Atlantic edge of Ireland. Through otherworldly landscapes, we follow a shrouded, spectral figure. Ravaged by gravity, wind and light; it flares up out of the rock and salt waters; it billows into liquid, dusts and gases; and then standing at the water’s edge, the weight of being earthbound becomes apparent. Woven into this meditation on grief and the forces that bind us are the ghosts of the Atlantean Irish, of the ancient connections between the seafaring people of Connemara and those of the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa. Working with a 1951 recording of an Irish ‘keen’, musician David Donohoe has composed a new, multi-layered piece that accompanies this entire body of work, and is included in the book as a 10″ vinyl record.
