Category: Culture

A few weeks back E and walked west to the Hudson and walked down the pier towards Battery Park city, an exercise we don’t do nearly enough in this busy city. It’s not the same as walking along Lake Merritt in Oakland, and not even close to walking barefoot through the sand along the ocean side but there’s a definite soothing comfort listening to the the small waves crashing against a mosaic piers contend with auto traffic noise on the West Side Highway.

We stopped at a bench near a Water Taxi stop and a man made stone structure I found soon enough to be the Irish Hunger Memorial. The Irish Hunger Memorial (or Irish Famine Memorial), is designed to raising public awareness of the events that led to the “Great Irish Famine and Migration” of 1845-1852 and to encourage efforts to address current and future hunger worldwide. One and a half million Irish were lost through famine related death and the Diaspora. The design expresses a desire to react and respond to changing world events without losing its focus on the project’s commemorative intent.

The 96′ x 170′ Memorial, designed by artist Brian Tolle, contains stones from each of Ireland’s 32 counties (#2), and is elevated on a limestone plinth. Along the base are these bands of texts separated by layers of imported Kilkenny limestone. The text, which combines the history of the Great Famine with contemporary reports on world hunger, is cast as shadow onto illuminated frosted glass panels.

Central to Tolle’s project is an authentic Famine-era cottage donated to the Memorial by his extended family, the Slacks of Attymass, County Mayo, Ireland. The cottage has been painstakingly reconstructed on the Memorial’s halfacre site as an expression of solidarity to those who left from those who stayed behind. From the cottage, visitors to the Memorial meander along paths winding through a rugged landscape thickly planted with native Irish flora-plants often found growing in fallow fields. Ascending to an overlook twenty-five feet above the ground, the visitor confronts a breath-taking view of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island beyond. This landscape is cantilevered over a stratified base of glass and fossilized Irish limestone, presenting a theater of historical and modern sentiments about famine worldwide. Layers of mutable text, appearing beyond touch as shadows upon the glass, wrap around the exterior of the Memorial and into the passageway leading to the cottage while accounts of world hunger are heard from an audio installation overhead.

Brian Tolle is an internationally renowned sculptor and public artist. His recent public works include Waylay for the Whitney Biennel in Central Park (2002), Man’s Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe for the Queens Museum of Art (2001) and WitchCatcher at MetroTech Center Brooklyn (1997) reinstalled in New York City Hall Park (2003). Using a variety of media, his works draw themes from the scale and experience of their surroundings provoking a re-reading by cross-wiring reality and fiction. In much of his work he uses cutting-edge technology in unexpected ways, blurring the border between the contemporary and the historical.

Surprisingly more info is on this Irish site, not a NYC site.

Most of our citizenry believes that hunger only affects people who are lazy or people who are just looking for a handout, people who don’t’ want to work, but, sadly, that is not true. Over one-third of our hungry people are innocent children who are members of households that simply cannot provide enough food or proper nutrition. And to think of the elderly suffering from malnutrition is just too hard for most of us. Unlike Third World nations, in our country the problem is not having too little – it is about not caring enough! Write your elected representatives and promote support for the hungry.
— Erin Brokovich

pictures by Wally