Research Note 16: Opening Portals

I've been thinking about why I keep doing this.

I suppose small things happen along the way that make you believe you are doing the right thing for you.

My grandmother, my mother's mother, died in 1971 when I was five, very close to my birthday.

I was far too young to ask her any questions about her life. I knew very little about the woman she had been before my mother came along, let alone me.

I had this photograph of her, though.

She looks like a young, Victorian lady, standing in the St Laurent photographer's studio in Montreal. Teresa, had her photograph taken there and then sent it home to her family in Ireland.

From mum, I knew that that Teresa and her sister Ellie had gone to Montreal as young women and had trained as Bell telephone operators there, but I didn't know when they had gone. I didn't have a date. I didn't even have a year!

But I wanted to go.

So, when I was forty, and living in London on my own, I travelled from Liverpool to Montreal on a freight ship and planned to spend a month in the city researching. I wanted to find the photographer's studio, to see if it still existed. I wanted to film the journey across the sea.

Truth be told, I didn't really know what I was looking for.

The night before the ship sailed, I called my mother for the last time before I hit the high seas.

She couldn’t wait to tell me that some old letters had just turned up in a neighbour's house near my cousins, in the area where my grandmother had lived.

They were letters from my mother's aunt Ellie, and my grandmother, sent from Montreal.

The first one was dated 1909 where Ellie wrote that she had a sore throat, which she thought she had caught on the boat coming over.

The bundle of letters were written to a woman called Bella McSorley and contained addresses of where the O’Connor sisters lived in Montreal and news about what they were doing, thoughts on home and about missing everyone.

The two young women continued to write to Bella for several years, the last ones in the bundle dating from 1913.

Suddenly I knew much more about the journey I was about to take and a bit more about the work I would eventually go on to make.

I couldn't believe it.

My mother said, "Someone is looking down on you for sure."

And maybe that's where my idea of opening portals comes from.

Teresa O’Connor, circa 1910, Montreal - b.Ireland 1890- d. Northern Ireland 1971

THE WORK

Bell(a) Exchange was first shown in a solo exhibition at Void Gallery, Derry, in 2007, and subsequently at EV+A International, Limerick, and Claremorris Open in 2008. It was one of the EV+A International Art Prize winners in 2008, judged by Hou Hanru.