Finbar Flanagan

As the title suggests, this project is about a monster of the sea, however I look more at the monstrous power of the sea rather than a mythological creature wrecking havoc. The shoreline of my home village of Blackwater has been eaten away continuously in my thirty three years living in the area and it has taken rock, sand, dirt, road, houses, electricity poles, fences and livestock down into its watery grave. This project looks at one particular property known as pond cottage as I have documented its decay and disappearance over the years.

I used different mediums of art practices and story telling while working with pond cottage. These included photography in both documentary and concept approaches, found objects, screen print, aerial still and moving image and also the written word.

The project has been ongoing for nine years so different parts of the building have been vanishing from the landscape on each return visit. The attached pond also approaches ever close to the bank where it will inevitably drain into the sea below after an unknown amount of time.

As the cottage and pond was changing visually so was my style of making work. I was moving away from straight and documentary style imagery and starting to approach my subject s from a more conceptual mindset. While exploring thiis I tried different way’s of making art with screen printing photographs becoming my main focus.

I wanted to push the limits of my concept further for the exhibition and I was interested how I could instil the notin of lost memory in the area. That is when I had the idea of collecting objects from teh houses ruin at the bottom of the cliff. In paticular I found a window which I though had so many conceptual meanings regarding home, memory and the pane between the sea and the land.

Pairing the physical window with the screen printed building it came from created a type of inclusion in the printed building and I played off this more by printing a large areal sticker of the bulding from above that you had to stand on to view the window.