Throughout the nineteenth
century, the construction of churches, schools, hospitals, convents and the
many other institutions of the Roman Catholic Church radically transformed the
Irish landscape. Although some of these structures - particularly school
buildings - retain their original function, many more have changed use, or are entering
a period of slow decay and are becoming ruins. Ruins act as visual markers of
time within the landscape - representing a particular distillation of ideology,
history and memory. While the image of the ruined medieval ecclesiastical
building - noble, austere, stripped down and beautiful - resides comfortably
within our visual culture, appearing often within tourist advertising
campaigns, the declining structures of the Victorian Devotional Revolution are
in the process of ruination, occupying the awkward middle ground between active
use and site of memory. This paper explores the representation of the process
of decline and obsolescence in relation to these buildings, as processes within
the creation of ‘new’ ruins of the recent past.
This process of decline, and of
ruin-in-the-making, has been perceptively explored and reflected in
contemporary visual art and poetry. This paper considers the representation of
convents and female religious life in the work of four artists (three visual
artists and one poet). The works considered are Tacita Dean’s hour-long film Presentation Sisters (2005), Faith (2008), a series of photographs by
Jackie Nickerson, Where Do Broken Hearts
Go (2000), an installation with photographs, sound and sculpture by Daphne
Wright, and The Boys of Bluehill
(2015), the most recent collection of poems by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Each of these works explores the position of
nuns in contemporary Ireland and their relationship to their institutional and
architectural structures, once well populated but now severely in decline. In
particular, this paper considers the ways in which these works negotiate the
idea and aesthetics of decline and ruination in relation to broader social
attitudes towards religion, shared social and cultural memories of female
religious orders in Ireland, and to the individual decision to live a spiritual
life.