Eamonn Doyle イーモン・ドイル

In 2017, Eamonn’s mother, Kathryn, died. His brother, Ciarán, had died suddenly at age thirty-three in 1999 and their mother had never managed to escape the grief that flowed from this puncture in time’s fabric.

Throughout the years from Ciarán’s death to her own, Kathryn had written hundreds of letters to her dead son. Eamonn began layering these letters together — threads of thought, once spun of grief, becoming rewoven into a dense textus (‘cloth’) of time condensed.

He then embarked on the creation of his K series, in which we follow a shrouded, spectral entity, ravaged by gravity, wind, and light, across the otherworldly landscapes of Connemara on Ireland’s western Atlantic coast and of the south-west of Spain.

Working with a 1951 recording of an Irish keen, a traditional form of lamentation song for the dead, musician David Donohoe has created a sound composition fundamental to this body of work.

K is further interwoven with the ghosts of the ‘Atlantean Irish,’ of the ancient connections between the seafaring people of Connemara and those of the Iberian Peninsula and Northern Africa.

Here at Higashihonganji O-genkan, the work has been returned to the cloth — to the textus — from which it was born. Kathryn’s Letters are presented as keening scrolls, endless prayer-songs cast out to the cosmos. Inside, the images of K hang as large printed silks, ethereal shrouds depicting the towering spirits they once enveloped, woven from the threads of lives cut short, embodying the weight and weightlessness of our own transience.
Text by Niall Sweeney