TRANSCRIPT: Notes From Dunfanaghy 2: Sand Dunes and the Southern Hemisphere
Hi, it’s Megan. Welcome to the second Notes from Dunfanaghy voice memos.
So in case you missed it, I’m sending a voice memo every weekday for the next month or so. And these are voice memos that I’m kind of in the habit of sending myself as I’m developing new work. And so I’m starting to think more and more about the retreat that’s happening in Dunfanaghy at the end of September. And I’m sharing my musings with you as well as myself, for your sins.
So today I’m wandering around London and I’ve just stopped in a square. So hopefully it won’t be too noisy. But I’m wandering around and I’m thinking about the fact that nothing is linear.
And there’s just this constant evolution, this constant shifting. And I think about this when I think about identity — whether we’re talking about the identity of our work, or our personal identity, or our identity as the artist, the creator of the work, whether you think of yourself as an artist or not.
And so in yesterday’s note I was talking about the idea of the geological present, and the messages that the geology around Dunfanaghy has to teach me. And, like, talk about nothing is linear — I knew this a long time ago, but I just haven’t thought about it as I’ve gone back and been looking at the geology of the rocks around Dunfanaghy. I have been reminded of the fact that the rocks that make up Ireland were formed and came together in the southern hemisphere.
You know, we’re talking hundreds of millions of years ago, but Ireland was formed in the southern hemisphere, a lot of it in the mid-tropics, which is quite the thought. There was this ancient ocean, the Iapetus Ocean, that Ireland was formed as that ocean closed. So the Atlantic didn’t even exist at this point. North America was part of the same landmass as Ireland at some point, very close together. The landmass that became Australia was in the northern hemisphere. The whole thing was just completely different and unrecognisable to what we know today and what we think of.
I don’t know — there are things that we think are givens in our work and in our lives, and actually the more you pull on any string in your work or your life, if it is a subject that has any kind of depth to it, you will just discover fewer and fewer answers and more and more questions, and more and more complexity and nuance and all of that stuff.
And it makes me think about James Hutton, who is one of the founders of modern geology, a Scottish fella. He used to talk about, in terms of geology, there is no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end. And I think about that quote a lot.
And I think about the fact that we are trying to live a finite life in an infinite reality. And how do we make sense of that? And how do we figure out the work that only we can do in the midst of that? And how do we do that work? And how do we make sense of that work when reality is just so wild? Like, Ireland was formed in the Southern Hemisphere. There were mountain ranges as tall as the Himalayas that have been and gone. The whole thing is just wild when you think about it. And our tiny little brains can’t really comprehend it.
And so all of this makes me think about a metaphor that I’ve been using for the last six or seven years, maybe. And it’s pretty much how I think about identity. It’s something that I talk about at the retreat in Dunfanaghy on the first day every year. It’s a foundational part of my work. And it is the idea of sand dunes and the paradox of sand dunes.
Sorry, my books are floating around in the wind here.
So on the first day in Dunfanaghy, I always take people for a stroll through the sand dunes by the sea. And we talk about identity, and we think about identity, because when you think about a set of sand dunes — like the set of sand dunes at the beach in Dunfanaghy — they’ve been there my entire life. And one of the things that I learned very early on as a child is that I go to the beach, the sand dunes will always be there, but they won’t necessarily be exactly the same every time.
So some days, if you go there and there has been a storm, then the front of the big dune, the beach in Dunfanaghy, might be gouged out. It might look completely different to how it looked a few days earlier. Or even if you go there a few days or weeks apart and there hasn’t been any kind of storm, there is still the action of the wind and the sea, and the shape of the dunes will have shifted.
And so a set of sand dunes is this permanent feature in the landscape. It’s stable enough to be known and visited again and again, but also it’s constantly shifting — and not in a linear fashion, it’s constantly evolving.
And so this is how I think about our identity, and this is how I think about the identity of our work. It’s permanent in terms of a human scale, a human lifespan, and it’s stable enough to be known, but also it’s constantly in this process of evolution, it’s constantly shifting.
Sometimes for people just the question of what is your work, or who are you, seems completely overwhelming, because they inherently know that those are unanswerable questions. Like, who are you? We’re so layered, we’re so complex, we’re so constantly shifting and changing, that by the time you answer that question, you’ve already outgrown the answer.
And the same is so often true of our work. I quite often joke that I can make a website that’s a really accurate representation of my work two or three years ago. But it’s impossible to create a website that’s an accurate representation of your work right now. Because as soon as you capture that and execute on it, you’ve moved on from it. You’re on to the next thing. You’re on to the next evolution.
So sand dunes — that’s my offering for you today.
I’ll see you tomorrow. And if you’re interested in the Dunfanaghy retreat, you can sign up on my website, you can email me if you have questions. If you’re coming, if you’re signed up already, you’re coming to the retreat, and you have any thoughts or reflections on any of the stuff that comes up over the course of these notes that you would like to go into more at the retreat, shoot me an email, I will make a note.
I always keep numbers small enough at the retreat that the group is small enough that we can evolve and go in the direction that you need to go. So I come with prepared material, but also it’s loose enough and free enough that it can fit the shape of whoever is there.
Thanks for listening. I’ll see you tomorrow.