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.