The next image is a lithograph of a closed fist with old style shackles around it.  It was here I began to think about religious oppression.  From my research, religion dominated peoples thoughts and actions at the time.  Parents couldn't use contraception because the church was against it.  As a result, families were large which made things very hard for them.  They could barely feed or cloth themselves as a result of this, which essentially made peoples lives overly harsh. This made them despise their situation even more.  The closed fist could represent their anger while the chains are in a cross shape which could be a religious reference.  Yet it isn't directly related to the situation.  Similar to the eye etching, I chose this image because it can be interpreted in many different ways.

From here, I decided on doing an etching of a teary eye.  I experimented with the different shades of dark and bright yet purposefully neglected colour as I believe black and white convey the emotions I'm trying to get across more effectively.  I chose this image because it's not specific and provokes curiosity.  Who's eye is it?  Why is he/she crying?  What's the context of the situation?  If it was too specific to Irish history people would know straight away and move on so I went out of my way to make it as vague yet interesting to look at as possible.

I found a census of my family on my fathers side from 1901 and 1911.  In it I found out my great grandfather was a stone mason/farmer.  The whole family were primarily badly off, uneducated farmers.  There were 5 children in the family in 1901 and 7 in 1911 so it was a fairly large family.  From all the research I've done on the topic, I got the same message.  These lower class people were poor, starving, struggling and oppressed on an international scale.  I wanted to tell their sad story through images that don't directly relate to them.  I wanted to allow these images to be interpreted in many ways and at the same time get across the sense of hardship/anger at their situation that my ancestors would have felt.  An example of such a situation is one of my uncles called Denis Doherty who was evicted from his home for his inability to pay rent in 1862.  I wanted to get these feelings across yet avoid representing the scene directly.

The artists I read up on a while back such as Lynd Ward, Laurence Hyde, etc work primarily with black and white and there prints are quite sorrowful or scary almost.  There is clearly an element of suffering and hardship going on and this interested and influenced my ideas a lot.  From this I got the idea of focusing on how my family would have lived and occupied their home spaces in Ireland 100 years ago as this would have been a time of extreme hardship, famine, starvation, poverty, etc.   These places would have primarily Gneeveguilla in Co. Kerry and Allihies in Co. Cork.  From here, I dug right into my own family history to learn about how my ancestors lived.

Later on, I started thinking about how we occupy space like how we live, work, act etc.  Then I had an idea for comparing how humans occupy space with how animals occupy space.  Animals live in harmony with the world while humans are destroying it bit by bit with pollution, burning fossil fuels, wars etc.  I abandoned this idea however as it was too broad.  I needed something more narrow and specific to a certain time.  That's when I started looking through my family's history.

Our 2nd year project title is "Spaces, Structures and Systems".  I literally had no idea what to do so I started off by doing some research on the topic.  Turns out artists used that concept for years beforehand.  I found a handy little website that covers the general history of last centuries artists approach to the topic.  It covers everything from Cubism to the Destruction of Visual Space.  I started the project by reading this.

http://www.ski.org/CWTyler_lab/CWTyler/Art%20Investigations/C20th_Space/C20thSpace.html