Portals Allies #1 Ciarán Wood Unconcisous Carpets

Ciarán Wood‘s artistic practice persistently returns to questions of location, extimate biography, and the intimacy of geopolitical feeling, predominantly indexed by his grandmother’s departure from Ireland c. 1950. Often in Wood’s work, his family history is a starting point for narratives within his practice – drawing from folklore and the land to weave and revisit accounts, repositioning events, and questioning the function of recording a moment.

‘Unconscious Carpets’ is an iteration of a concept radio show by Wood, who predominantly works within moving-image and installation. Incorporating elements of writing, performance and archival video mixed-live, Wood also invited a selection of artists and musicians to contribute to a collective “arrival”, taking different forms of a speculative journey between Ireland and London. The show is based around the concept of a north London Irisb pub, once the epicentre of the city’s Irish community, as a place to pass through or remain until (as many are now) the pubs are closed and redeveloped.

“This speculative journey is an attempt to look at the intersection of collective memory in understanding Ireland’s complex relationship with (colonial) England, through the memory of sodden carpets of boarded-up Irish pubs in North London.” – Ciarán Wood