Don’t Need No Country, Don’t Need No Flag
“We look at the world once, in childhood, the rest is memory” – Louise Gluck /
As water flowed confidently from the river to the quay and on to our little patch of land, into the hall, on to our kitchen floor, it headed for the legs of the chairs and the table and lapped towards our bookshelves and what we thought of as precious during the frequent flooding of the river outside our door in Carrick on Suir. With the water came river rats, debris and mud and a changed landscape inside the house and outside it, and as far as my childish eyes could see….
When my father dived deep into the water and brought our little four year old neighbour up from the bottom – drowned while jumping onto a barge from the quay, my childhood vision was set towards a course of uncertainty, instability and unknowing and as a result became attuned to a change in the weather, to the weight of the rain, the frequency of the rain and to the water that could enter the new electric sockets sending us into darkness – and take small children away.
Wading through the mucky water in Bridge street in their wellingtons, while sounds ofsongs and snatches of words came from voices on the wireless radios of the time through open front doors, the word spread as quickly as the water and neighbours and friends gathered together in acts of solidarity and care, lifting furniture, moving clothes horses and schoolbags out of the way of the rising water, They made tea and sandwiches and spoke of flooding in nearby places like Clonmel and Waterford and faraway places like Bangladesh.
My father said little about his time in the RAF after the second world war but knowing that he had travelled across the high seas by boat to and from Asia and the fact that our home served as a guest house welcoming people from many different countries, sowed the seed in my childhood mind of a world greater than that of our small corner of Carrick on Suir.
As the waters receded, the mud was swept out of the house, the furniture lifted down, things damaged beyond repair were consigned to the bin and the neighbours went home until the next time – and in a childish effort to give my world a more solid shape, on lined blue paper from my mother’s writing pad and with her blue biro, I drew figures of men, womenand children in their wellingtons beside the river, standing and walking with sweeping brushes and cups of tea in their hands, all together in a watery world which knows no boundaries – the earth wide open.
Similar to my experiences in childhood – the thundering sound of the river in flood, the feeling of dampness creeping in, the flooded street, the flooded houses, distant music and the community of problem solvers and carers have all porously flowed through my life as an adult, as my family, neighbours and I have weathered many floods on the quayside of the river Nore, accompanied by other river rats, debris, mud and damage to property and possessions.
In the process of creating paintings and drawings the memories and emotions from the past coalesce with thoughts, emotions and feelings about our present day living through the climate emergency, and in their way, along with paint and solvents, these feelings become co-authors of the work. The act of painting becomes then a form of survival based on slow time, a long view and a philosophy of resilience and hope.
I want to thank Paul Fahy, director of the Galway International Arts Festival for placing his trust in my process, for giving me a platform to display this work which to me sometimes still feels like my small drawings made on the kitchen table after the flood –
Bernadette Kiely, July 2024.