Dr Silvia Loeffler of Maynooth University will speak at the ‘Women and the Sea’ symposium about the visibility as much as the invisibility of women’s experiences in a maritime environment like Dun Laoghaire Harbour and how these experiences may be mapped in ways that create new pathways of thinking as to how we relate to the places and spaces we inhabit.
In Irish, the word glas is reserved for the layered shades of green, blue and silver present in the sea. Glas Journal is about layered emotional geographies of Dun Laoghaire Harbour, woven into the physicality of what one may call ‘home’. I will discuss the harbour as a womb-like structure, which is tied in with the process or the journey across water to reach home (whatever ‘home’ may stand for).
Glas Journal as an artistic participatory cartography is held together by map fragments that connect research and arts practice and the interaction with local partners – women, men and children in the community. Much inspiration has derived form discarded maps that are stored away in the Offices of the Dun Laoghaire Harbour Company, and the sea atlases and ocean charts that are hidden away in the Maritime Museum’s storage rooms. By using these guideposts of former times, the emphasis is on feelings of return and transition. We have been there before, but where are we now?
Women and the Sea 