#singingstones
In 1850, in Dublin’s Richmond male penitentiary, vagrants whether old, infirm or children were employed at stone breaking. Vagrants had to fulfil their fair share of the labour, which was determined by their bodily strength, or as punishment their dinner allowance was halved.
In The Northern Whig, Belfast, Saturday August 10 1850, it was announced that:
WILL OPEN IN A FEW DAYS,
At the Assembly-Rooms, Commercial Buildings, Belfast,
SPRINGTHORPE’S EXTENSIVE AND gorgeously appareled collection of WAX-WORK FIGURES, Grand Cosmoranic Views, ROCK HARMONICON, Specimens of French Art &c,, &c.
In Singing Stones the artist Cathal McGinley and the curator/researcher Declan Sheehan are making new work with the stone featured in fragments of Irish archives – from maps, to newspapers, to hunger and welfare, crime and punishment, performance and art.
Look out for #singingstones online and onsite in West Donegal, as part of Cathal McGinley’s open studio at An Gailearai in Gweedore from September to mid October 2020.
Research featured includes quote from Lawlor, Crime in nineteenth-century Ireland: Grangegorman female penitentiary and Richmond male penitentiary, with reference to juveniles and women, 1836-60, NUI Maynooth, 2012 AND the OPW image The Stonebreaker’s Yard in Kilmainham Gaol.
the empire of the senses 