Debbie Godsell tells Stephanie McBride that she used natural light in her photographs of harvest displays in churches in Co Cork to portray as honest an image as possible
In his short story ‘Of the Cloth’, William Trevor writes of a Protestant clergyman who ‘belonged to this landscape’, steadfastly rooted in his declining rural parish. Trevor, himself a Protestant, frequently articulates this minority’s uneasy existence within a new but predominantly Catholic Irish state, and the gradual eclipse of Protestant faith and identity. After ethnologist Deirdre Nuttall highlighted the lack of archival folk material of this minority, artist Debbie Godsell decided to record the Harvest Festival practice that is, as a National Folklore Collection podcast points out, ‘unique to the Church of Ireland’.
‘As my work had already been centred on themes of identity, it seemed a natural step to visually document the Harvest Thanksgiving custom,’ she says. This eventually became ‘Flail’, a project that also addresses ‘the larger issue of southern Irish Protestant identity as it exists currently’.
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