A Noticer in Ireland
- Colleen Farris
- Jul 25, 2024
- 3 min read
Creative protest
26 July 2024
Since I arrived in Ireland, I have been noticing everything, and taking photos of everything that I notice. Noticing is my superpower. The joke in my family is that my extraordinary attention to detail comes from being an only child. There may be some truth in this. I also am very sensitive to sound and have a knack for listening to what is going on around me. These sensory skills kept me entertained as a child. As an adult, they still delight me.
Ireland has been a feast for my senses. I have taken hundreds of photos and videos to capture the sights and sounds so that I can remember them and share them with others. It is rare that I have the time to stop and take as many photos as I want when I visit someplace new. So, it is with great pleasure that I have indulged my every whim to take photos on this trip. I even walked back to a location in Dublin the day after visiting it because I had not taken all the photos I wanted on my first visit.
This summer in Ireland, I noticed several features of the natural and built world that fascinated me. As a result, I have photos of manhole covers, fences, windows, close ups of flowers and plants, recordings of water flowing over locks and spillways, streams trickling through underbrush, the wind in the trees, and seagulls crying. Most of the time, I do not do anything with my photos and videos after I take them except to refer back to them periodically, but this summer is different. In Ireland, I felt the urge to discover beauty in the natural world and in the world humans have fashioned.
When I visited Trinity College in Dublin, I was taken by the statue of the college’s former provost. His countenance was framed by a bright blue sky with small, white, scudding clouds. He looked kindly, in a patriarchal, early twentieth century way. I took a few photos of his monument before my tour began. During the tour, I was surprised to learn that the provost had proclaimed that no woman would enter Trinity College while he was alive. The punchline of the story was that he died on the same day a woman was sitting for the entrance exam.
I was taken with this story. I had just visited the National Gallery of Ireland, where I took many photos of women represented in the art there, including several on the sidelines in larger works of art. As a result, the idea of women on the margins was top of mind when I heard this tale. I had the idea to place him at the center of a collage surrounded by women. It would feel petty to do so, except women are still facing the same attitudes today. The message that women deserve access to education, and are capable of wielding power is urgent.
I encountered this attitude in the flesh the night I went céilí dancing in Galway. During a dance in which all the men and women were taking turns leading and following, an older, retired American man with whom I was dancing refused to take the following position. On an otherwise joyous evening of dance, this dance partner kept switching to stay in the lead, even as several other men in the circle danced blithely on without thinking.
Even though this behavior comes from a minority of men, it has far reaching impacts. I suspect that it even impedes our ability to save our planet from human depredations (Regan, 2020). There are men who are terrified of associating themselves with any actions, any words, any roles, anything at all that is deemed feminine (Brough, 2016). Of course women are not a monolith and are not perfect, but the feminine is biologically generative. I cannot help wondering if somewhere in the toxic fear of the feminine there is an acknowledgment of the wild, untamable power of creativity that women embody (whether they have children or not).
Creativity is the lifeblood of our society. If we are afraid of creativity in forms that nurture, preserve, and grow we will surely destroy ourselves. The corollary is that not knowing is more powerful than knowing. These two lessons are gifts from Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question. Perhaps my small act of creative protest is a way of living into my as yet to be discovered beautiful question. I will keep you posted!
References
Berger, W. (2024). A more beautiful question: The power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas. Bloomsbury.
Brough, A. R., Wilkie, J. E., Ma, J., Isaac, M. S., & Gal, D. (2016). Is eco-friendly unmanly? the green-feminine stereotype and its effect on sustainable consumption. Journal of Consumer Research, 43(4), 567–582. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucw044
Regan, S. (2020, June 22). How gender & the environment are intrinsically linked. mindbodygreen RSS. https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/ecofeminism-history-and-principles
