About Mary

About Mary (2019-2022)

Our identity is linked to the place and our history and cultural bonds. Leaving our country is never easy, it is an extreme and obligatory choice, just as it is not easy to live in a place that does not belong to us, where we lose our familiar points of reference.

Years ago I found the suitcase of my great-grandmother Mary Fagan who emigrated from Ireland in the early 1900s. There were a dress and a diary. Shortly before embarking on a journey that would take her away from her Ireland, Mary began to write about what she lived in her daily life, the dreams she had at night preparing to leave everything, her fears, and hopes for a new beginning.

In this work, I narrate Mary's thoughts and emotions with images, taking inspiration from her diary while she was preparing with her husband Patrick for the journey to leave Mullingar and go to live in Glasgow in Scotland, where with difficulty she rebuilt a life in a Country where integration for Irish Catholics was difficult.

In my images, I try to tell that if we put ourselves "in the shoes" of the other we can better understand what he lives and what he feels. It is a family story of the past, but still relevant today. It concerns the history of the last ones, of the fugitives, of the lonely, without a homeland.

But above all making painful and difficult choices to find a way of salvation, possibility, and hope.