‘Only a Canvas Between You and the Sea’: The Currach in Irish Feminist and Ecocritical Art Practice

A currach (or curragh) is a small boat, traditionally made of skin or canvas stretched over wooden ribs and rowed with oars. In The Aran Islands (1907), J. M. Synge described ‘moving away from civilization’ on board a currach, and in the early to mid-twentieth century, visual artists such as Paul Henry and Seán Keating employed this vernacular watercraft as a symbol of ‘authentic’ Irish identity on Ireland's western seaboard, characterised by tradition, heroic masculinity, and mastery of nature. Contemporary Irish artist Dorothy Cross has more recently employed currachs in sculpture and video work, notably in Teacup (1997), which uses a still from Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran (1934) and Basking Shark Currach (2013), a currach frame partially covered with the found skin of a basking shark. Critical of masculine and essentialised framings of Irish identity and humans’ exploitative relationship with marine life, Cross's work uses the currach to engage with issues of identity, gender and the environment. Belfast-based artist Susan Hughes has used interviews with currach-makers and rowers, as well as her own experiences swimming and rowing along Ireland's north coast, to generate video, sculpture and installation work exploring the vulnerability of humans at sea, exemplified in Something Happens to Time (2021). Focusing on these case studies, this essay will chart the currach's shifting resonances and uses in Irish art practice, from the early-twentieth century to the present day. I will consider its transition from a symbol of ‘authentic’ Irish identity and masculine heroism to a tool for the critique of essentialised Irish identity as well as gendered and environmental issues in the Irish context. Finally, I will point to one of its current places in ecocritical art practice: as a mediator between human and sea, and a locus for an embodied experience – not of heroism, but of powerlessness.