Dinnseanchas – Christina McBride

Dinnseanchas is a new series of photographic works which form part of a larger body of research developed during a residency in the west coast of Ireland.

The research is centred on the specifics of the landscape,  and its interweaving with the Irish  language and family  lineage. Methodologies include expanding more sustainable materials and processes within the production of work and testing the produce from both the land and the sea as plant-based developers. 

The term Dinnseanchas is an ancient practice which began as a process of naming places, informed by a combination of their natural and physical forms, or a reference to some of the historical layers and legends specific to that place. As it developed it became a form of mapping of  the entire country and is now recognised as a rich and important branch of knowledge in the Gaelic world. Dinnseanchas is also associated with perceptions  of ‘place wisdom’ – and  ways of understanding the landscape and ‘reading the manuscript of the land.’ 

The exhibition includes a text work by Sara O Brien, a writer/researcher based between Glasgow and Dublin.

Christina McBride is an artist based in Glasgow who has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally with solo exhibitions in New York and Mexico City. Much of her research is located within lens-based enquiry with a committed focus on analogue practices/processes, and expanding the discourse around its medium specificity – particularly in relation to time and place. She has a particular interest in alternative printing processes and expanding the use and understanding of sustainable and more environmentally conscious materials and processes.

Landscape both as a subject and a context within which to locate her practice, has been at the core of her enquiries over many years. Often works focus on transient, incidental and ephemeral phenomena in fleeting images that address abstraction, in order to question how one might articulate the experience of the natural world – simultaneously through both the image and materialitity of the photograph.

Christina also teaches on the Master of Fine Art (MFA) programme and in Fine Art Photography at the Glasgow School of Art.

Sara O’Brien is a writer and researcher based between Dublin and Glasgow. Her writing has appeared in MAP Magazine, The Drouth, Paper Visual Art, Glasgow Review of Books and Mirror Lamp Press, amongst other places. She has also produced texts to accompany exhibitions at various art spaces, including CCA Glasgow, David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, and An Gailearaí, Donegal. Her current research explores the intersections and interrelations between art and writing through the lens of translation.