Marianne Keating: The Ocean Between

In The Ocean Between, Marianne Keating addresses the hidden histories of the Irish diaspora in the Caribbean by narratively reconstructing this history through its archival traces. Her multi-media installation focuses on the movement of Irish indentured labourers to Barbados in the 17th century and to Jamaica in the 19th century, examining their resulting legacies in the contemporary Caribbean. Recalling the Crawford Art Gallery as a site of departure through its earlier role as the Custom House of Cork, Keating traces Irish migration from ports in Ireland.

Excavating official government documents at the Irish, English, Jamaican and the Barbadian National Archives, alongside on-site investigation of other remaining visual and material traces, the artist accumulates overlooked traces and disregarded accounts. Keating seeks to insert a series of previously muted or silent voices into the archive and to give them presence.

Analysing the gaps within the archive and the non-sequential manner in which the archive is navigated, the moving forward and backwards between time and place, allows the gaps in one archive to be informed by that of another. Through the examination of oral, private and disregarded histories, her multi-disciplinary approach to the research, the archival record and the archival image questions the legitimacy of the archive and falsification within the recorded image and text.

Landlessness (2017) is a dual screen film of which one video tells of the economic hardships of the Catholic Irish under British Colonial Rule and their resulting migration to Jamaica. The second video—which runs concurrently—explores the reason for the recruitment of Irish indentured labourers, their resulting movement, arrival and settlement in Jamaica. Keating juxtaposes images of Caribbean landscapes with text narratives of these indentured labourers.

In Better Must Come – A New Jamaica (2019), Keating focuses on the legacies of Irish indentured labourers in contemporary Jamaica. Following the trajectory of the Irish in Jamaica, this film focuses on two cousins Norman Washington Manley and Alexander Bustamante whose grandfathers worked on the island’s King Valley Estate. Both men would become the driving forces in the two-party political system and their legacies are still felt today in Jamaican politics.  

In other work, created specifically for this exhibition, the artist harnesses post-colonial and archival theory, focusing her attention on the subaltern “poor whites” community on the East Coast of Barbados, a minority locally well-known although historically under-represented. Believed to be descendants of indentured labourers or servants—both voluntary and involuntary from Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales—since their arrival in the 17th century, the creolisation process now makes it difficult to determine their exact origins.

Marianne Keating’s ongoing research in Jamaica and Barbados has enabled her to consult records only accessible in the Caribbean, alongside onsite investigation in the communities where these descendants still live. The analyses of this material and sites are fundamental to Keating’s practice-based output, which involves the gathering of oral histories through interviews, film footage, research and documentation. Keating’s resulting work has determined new critical narratives around the Irish diaspora in response to the dominant “master narratives” of Western nationhood, rewriting the histories of the dominated “other.”

The Ocean Between by Marianne Keating is the first project of a new artist-directed programme at the Crawford Art Gallery, which supports artists in pursuit of their current research interests, exploring complex Irish histories and identities to connect with audiences through a collaboration with the Gallery’s site, collection and location.