SWALLOWING GEOGRAPHY

Through archival reconstruction we produced a scale model replica of 'the Irish village', a travelling exhibition of a faux Donegal village shown around the world throughout the 1800s.

The design of an exhibition identity, promotional material and other ephemera. We produced a piece of work to support the work of a dual venue exhibition in the Regional Cultural Centre and Glebe house, showing work from Cara Donaghey, Laura McCafferty, Eoghan McIntyre and Jill Quigley. As well as presenting a broad selection of artworks from the Arts Council Collection. Dorothy Cross and Louis le Brocquy. Due to the variation between the more than 35 artists on display, we presented work which took a wide approach and kept a relativley neutral visual identity. in 1883 after visiting Donegal Alice Hart set up the Donegal Industrial Fund. She arrived at a time when Donegal had witnessed a series of bad harvests known as the donegal famine. Alice Hart thought that the solution to this poverty could be in the revival of the irish cottage crafts in an attempt to present irish industries, art and customs asW commodities that could be exported. In order to present irish industries to the rest of the world she developed a model village. Her intent was to exhibit and tour irish craft. It was exhibited in the Chicago Worlds Fair, Edinburugh Liverpool, Paris, Dublin and London. It was quoted that the village that she created gave a sense of "geographical proximity" while the sense of spectacle was calculated to preserve a cultural divide. Even still alot of irish imigrants attended the exhibitions, especially irish americans and irish imigrants in liverpool. The faux village presented a scaled down version of blarney castle and had several cottages selling irish textiles and embroidery it also displayed wood carving, bog oak, galway marble carving celtic jewlery lace making and even sold irish dairy. This was happening just as the arts and crafts movement was developing. Through archival reconstruction of documents and images of the village we produced a scale model replica of the exhibition as it was in 1883 working from the catalogues plan view, we could extrude facades and then the archival images were used to replicate the focal lengths and positions in 3D space of the cameras. This could then tell us the heights and exact placement of the features of each building. We produced a custom typeface responding to the signage through the village, this can be seen within the display type. The layouts used throughout the exhibition were inspired by the printed ephemera associated with the village. We hope that presenting the replicated village in Donegal bridges the "geographical proximity" back to the fitional space it represented in a flourishing arts centre.

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