Ultimate Witnesses: The Visual Culture of Death, Burial and Mourning in Famine Ireland

The devastation of disease, the pace of death and fears of contagion not only altered the practices of mourning and burial during the calamitous height of the Famine, but have also shaped its visual representation and ongoing patterns of remembrance. Paintings and illustrations reflect on aspects of pre-famine conventions around death, burial and mourning, which drew on a culturally rich and complex range of Christian and Celtic pagan traditions. Later, famine-era images and objects reveal some of the distressing modifications to mortuary and funerary practices during the famine years. Since then, photographic archives, art works, monuments, memorial parks, cemeteries and unmarked burial grounds provide spaces for remembrance across the landscape of Ireland where visitor engagement is informed by competing forces of historical and touristic practices. This folio encompasses a cross-section of representational forms and strategies of remembrance of the Famine dead who were, to borrow Giorgio Agamben's term, the "ultimate witnesses" to that tragic period.

Author: Niamh Ann Kelly
Publisher: Cork University Press
Published: 09/01/2017
Pages: 48
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 10.74h x 6.95w x 0.18d
ISBN: 9780997837469

About the Author
Kelly, Niamh Ann: - "Niamh Ann Kelly lectures on the history of art and contemporary visual culture at the Dublin School of Creative Arts, Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), Ireland. She is Programme Chair of the BA Contemporary Visual Culture programme at DIT and a DIT member of the Irish Humanities Alliance. Her research interests are contemporary art, commemorative visual cultures of art, journalism, museum and heritage practice with a focus on visual, material and spatial memorialization of grievous histories. She has contributed to publications including Art and Architecture of Ireland, Volume V (The Twentieth Century) (2014), Art and Architecture of Ireland, Volume III (Sculpture and Sculptures) (2014), Memory Ireland Volume III: Cruxes in Irish Cultural Memory - The Famine and the Troubles (2014), Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture: Conflict, Resistance, and Agency (2011), Ireland's Great Hunger, Volume 2 (2010), Representation Matters: (Re) Articulating Collective Identities in a Postcolonial World (2010), Irish Museum of Modern Art - What is_Installation Art? (2010), and Hugh Lane: Founder of a Gallery of Modern Art for Ireland (2008). Her book Imaging the Great Irish Famine: Representing Dispossession in Visual Culture, I.B. Tauris, is due for publication in 2017."