Place is latitudinal and longitudinal within the map of a person's life. It is temporal and spatial, personal and political. A layered location replete with human histories and memories, place has width as well as depth. It is about connections, what surrounds it, what formed there, what will happen there.

Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local

Place  has always been this slice of land in Co. Kerry, it it a place where over the years an evolution of family break-ups, mental illness, legal battles, mapping, boundaries, neighbour hood disputes, narrow escapes, building, knocking down - these have all created an archive of my experience here. My role as a narrator, is to try to reveal some of these experiences in the sense that they were felt both now and in the past.

Both nothing and everything happen simultaneously in the country. It is a patient mans game living here. Time is not ruled by the ticking clock but by seasons and weather and what happens. When you live here you are aware of who is around, of what moved and what changed and what could happen. In Michel Foucault’s, ‘Madness & Civilization, he describes how; ‘according to many physicians, city life, the life of the court, of the salons, led to madness by this multiplicity of excitations constantly accumulated, prolonged, and echoed without ever being attenuated.’ Here in the country, we have time and space for this intensity to weaken, and as time goes by, the mad, become another story to tell. References to science in my practice reflect this sense of looking; this traverses from searching for crumbs on the floor to stars in the sky and building in fields.

Laura Fitzgerald was born in 1983 and received a first class honours degree in Fine Art Painting from the National College of Art & Design in 2007. She also studied in the Academy of Fine Art Leipzig and in Parsons School of Design in New York. Recent shows include: A tourist in Reality with artist Laura Byrne; Holding Together, a group show with the Douglas Hyde Gallery and the Salon Art Prize, Matt Roberts Arts, London. Future projects include a Percent for Art Commission for Castledermot National School Co.Kildare, collaborating with dancer Cathy O Kennedy.