Category: travel: exploration

The Taking Part – Why I love the process of travel

I love travel. Not just travel itself, but the process of travel.

There are many methods that can be taken. I am going to recount some of my personal favourites below.

Fly, sail, propel

By Plane

I had my first long-distance air flight in April 2012 on a flight from Dublin to New York. I was heading to Vermont to take part in an artist residency, and chose to detour through the metropolis. The compelling thing about air travel is the series of strange experiences associated with it. For example, the process of moving through an airport requires manners and behaviours that are bizarre in normal circumstances. Unlike other forms of public transport, arriving at an airport two hours before a flight is common practice, even when the flight itself will last less than 2 hours. Security checks, long cups of coffee, window-shopping for nothing in particular – each flight involves these unusual rituals Continue reading “The Taking Part – Why I love the process of travel”

Broadening The Mind – Flying machines and art

In Ancient Greek literature sudden and vast travel occurred regularly. As the nomadic and expansive ideas of the writers of that era sought to understand their world through travel they often created mystical methods of transcontinental journeying. Great waves tore Odysseus and his crew from his homeland, and the wings that Daedalus built helped him soar to freedom from his island prison. Airplane travel in the 20th Century led to unprecedented opportunities for travel and communication that mimic the adventurous nature of these fictional tales. If travel should broaden the mind then broader travel may have stretched the mind even further. The concept of travel has been broached across the arts, culminating in works in the late 20th Century and early this century that create a reality from the myth.

Sunset photograph of clouds from above, taken from an airplane

Visual artist Franz Ackermann has made a career from his indefinite nomadism, developing an exciting collection of paintings, photographs, drawings and installations that reflect the idea of skipping to and from urban locales Continue reading “Broadening The Mind – Flying machines and art”

“Blow In” – Nomadic ownership of place

“Sure, cried the tenant men, but it’s our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we killed on it, died on it…That’s what makes it ours – being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.” – from John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939, p38

People move. In the 20th Century, with the invention of the aeroplane, people began to move faster and further than they ever could before. But moving place is something that people have always done. From nomadic cultures and tribes to those who have moved out of necessity (due to famine or crisis), people have always crossed borders and scrambled into unexplored areas in search of a place that they can be born in, work in, and eventually die in.

A photograph of clouds from above, taken from an aeroplane window
The landscape of clouds from an aeroplane window is a territory that we will probably never blow in as far as.

People also “blow in”: the dismissive term blow-in is regularly bandied about in Ireland and other countries to describe people who have moved into and settled in a town or village Continue reading ““Blow In” – Nomadic ownership of place”

Nothing Gets In Or Out – The fascinating nature of life on islands

One of my current art projects looks at the idea of islands and life. Click for link.

Each year coyotes, somehow, make their way through the sprawling mass of the five burroughs and find their way into Central Park on the island of Manhattan. Island or not, dangerous or not, life seems to find a way to squeeze through the gaps to insulated sanctuaries even in the most unpredictable circumstances.

Islands have an impenetrable feel to them. They are locked away from access except by sea or by sky, and yet there always seems to be a travelling presence of something. There are uncountable records of remote islands ceding to populations from insect, animal, bird and even human. And as unlikely as it seems, and no matter how remote the destination, somehow life finds a way to expand and populate.

Image sourced at npr.org, click for link. Image by Patrick Honan / Nick Carlile, link unavailable.

Take for example the giant insects found on Ball’s Pyramid, a tiny island not far from the coast of Australia. These hand-sized crawlers, known informally as “tree lobsters”, somehow managed to find their way onto an uninhabited (and barely habitable) rocky precipice Continue reading “Nothing Gets In Or Out – The fascinating nature of life on islands”