Dublin-based Irish photographer Pauline Rowan is painting a mental picture for us of the deconsecrated convent at the heart of her long term project, Under a Vaulted Sky:
“There were acres of farmland and gardens, and pathways amongst the trees. Little outhouses and farm barns. There would have been cattle and animals. When I was there, the orchards were still bearing fruits. Rose bushes and other garden plants grew wild. Long grass grew in the field. Ivy grew over windows and statues. Buildings and rooms had been repurposed by the new caretaker tenants and artists. It was as if those whom the convents would have strived to keep out were now inside. The place itself functioned as a home to many, and it seemed a good home for them; a new community living in the remnants of an old.”
A complex and far-reaching work consisting of photography, performance, sculpture and archival materials, the project uses this convent as a prism through which to understand various facets of Irish culture, history, spirituality and power. Drawing attention to our relationship to home, especially the garden, the project focuses on the “Irish cultural repetition of the need to control the bod and land,” Rowan says, as well as the history of women in her home country, and themes of nature, worship and growth
Although it’s a diverse selection of subjects, all of them interlink critical coordinates to consider in what Rowan refers to as “an important time in Irish history, when it is separating itself from Catholic religion and re-finding its relationship to spirituality.” As Catholicism continues to lose its hold over her people, she says, “the remnants of a pagan past can be seen emerging”—as if pushing through the earth and spreading like ivy on old walls.
Built in Ireland in 1806, Rowan says the location of the convent isn’t as important as what it represents as a type of dwelling and societal structure, focusing “not just the religious order but the enclosed, bounded land, separate from the land around it. Its fortress-like structure is very clear in its function—to keep people, animals or nature either in or out.” That’s why the garden is so important too, she explains, because the concept of a garden symbolizes the control of nature. “The root of the word garden is ‘to grasp, enclose’,” she adds thoughtfully.
Eventually, the convent and its gardens ceased to exist as a convent, and the buildings and land were left to gently go wild for almost a decade. It was marked for demolition and redevelopment, and in the interim years parts of it became home to a number of transient residents and artist studios. Rowan herself moved into a studio there in 2017, and that’s when she really began to think about the bones of this old place, its history and what it had meant to different communities. She also began thinking about the idea of sanctuary—by the time she got there it was an unstable abode, rented week-to-week by guardians of the property who knew they wouldn’t be there forever, though it had once been a dependable home to the nuns of its past. “This atmosphere of a crumbling building represented a way of life for the nuns, a part of Irish history which was in a state of flux—its relationship to religion,” she says.
The inspiration for Under A Vaulted Sky was also a personal matter. Rowan’s mother had grown up in a convent similar to the one we see in her pictures, and that too had been demolished and replaced with a housing estate, which is why the themes of this project—home, abandonment, spiritualism, motherhood—make so much sense to her emotionally. Rowan’s mother’s father had been the gardener of the convent’s walled garden, and so the garden had been a space of solace for her mother, which is why gardens hold so much significance in this story.
On the subject of women and their place in the project, meanwhile, Rowan adds,“there is a history of abuse of children and women while in the care of religious orders, so in this project I look primarily at women in Ireland through my mothers experience, while also being sensitive to the collective experience of women in these environments.” Rowan is also now a mother herself too, which fed further into her thinking.
There is something utterly bewitching about the way inside and outside collide in Rowan’s photographs. In one image, an arched church recess has become subsumed by rocks and dirt, and a cavernous hole in the wall is flanked by an intricate old floral mural. In another, the artist herself lies across a table and holds a branch at her stomach, as if it is a root growing from within her. Outside, statues have been left to decay and bleed blue onto their stones, while man-made fences are beginning to encroach into the space. Apples and statues, trees and breeze blocks, women and acts of worship—a whole constellation of signs and symbols, past and present, tumble together here.
To begin Under A Vaulted Sky, Rowan decided to collaborate with residents of the convent both past and present, make portraits together, and find out their stories, religious and otherwise. In the end, she worked with eight of the building’s residents and three nuns who had previously lived there, with one nun in particular becoming central to the series. She also worked with her mother, and herself—adding in performative self-portraits of her own body responding to and interacting with the space.
“I wandered the gardens at night seeking a connection with the natural aspects of the site, and as its last days drew closer I almost created my own rituals with the place,” she says. “I brought my mother in, we walked the gardens, and when she touched plants like those her father had grown, it was as though she was in a memory of her past. Then we rewrote it. We went into the cloister chapel, I sat my mother on the throne, crowned in the flowers her father had grown for the altars, then I walked up the centre aisle and lay stretched out on the floor before her.”
Elsewhere, Rowan describes wrapping trees in swathes of fabric, taking cuttings and attempting to graft new apple trees and rose bushes. “I froze fallen apples and defrosted them, attempting to shock them into spring and germination. I sought a spark that could be reignited. At night, my partner and I raided the site and dug up huge rose tree stumps planting them in our garden. I was chased by builders as I documented the bulldozing of the trees.” She photographed everything, every intervention, and carried on like this until eventually the place as she knew it became one that only existed as a series of photographs. “It became material,” she says “…the statues, the women, the plants, walls, the land. They all became elements I studied.” In later works, Rowan also began collaging in archival biblical imagery of women too, pictures of deities and goddesses, as well as pagan symbolism such as snakes, apples and trees.
A walled garden is a fascinating concept from many angles. On one hand, it speaks to the ruthless categorizing and taming of nature, but on the other it speaks of a boundary against dangers. And when it ceases to be watched over, it grows beyonds its thresholds, allowing the outside back in. It is a place that can dictate and shape belonging. Rowan says that as she went about her work, it was always the garden that residents brought her back to when they spoke about the idea of home.
“Home had been the point of my initial entrance onto this stage,” she says, “but as time went on it became more apparent that this project was about belonging and loss. For in the building they felt ‘at home’ but in the garden, they felt they belonged. It was the garden and its ancient trees and roses that I endlessly tried to resurrect. Taking cuttings, wrapping them up. It was the oncoming destruction of a time’s sense of belonging, a place’s story being erased that ignited me to scramble and dig and desperately try to archive in photography a place that would be no more.”
Recalling a little more about the former convent, Rowan describes an atmosphere of gentle metamorphosis. “Items had been moved around over the years. Where certain rooms would house chairs, others would have fridges or religious statues in them. Some areas were growing carpets of mushrooms, and others Christmas tinsel trees. It was in complete flux and seemed to be trying to find its own order. It had an air of survival; like the end of days.” Elsewhere, in an accompanying essay to the project, she writes, “the sense of entropy drummed. Also a sense of shrouded history.” And that’s what emanates from her pictures more than anything—a powerful sense of all-consuming, deafening decline, characterized by Rowan’s restlessly creative ways of visualizing this unique atmosphere.
In another part of her essay, Rowan refers to an old James Joyce quote—“places remember events.”— Building on this sentiment, she elaborates: “this is why a place such as [this convent] could be considered a sacred monument. Destroying the convent and its gardens disrupts its story and its story demonstrates the succession of Irish power through time. By obliterating it without further repossessing of its sacred symbolism, its story is extinguished.” And ultimately, that’s where the power of photography comes in. With this work, Rowan has been able to continue the story of this place, to record its having been there, to meet its inhabitants and mark its changes, and to add something to the archive of it, before it is lost completely to the annals of the past.