BURNING HOUSE PRESS

I was thinking about Brutalism, cattle and passage tombs. Form, currency and death.

Walking the fields of North Cork and the headlands of Galway, casting cow-sheds as signs.

Homes for people, now homes for animals. Cycled forward by occupation, migration and forecasts. Radio broadcasts. Concrete and local stone piled into walls, supporting cold tin rooves. Corrugated steel. Cheap and functional, galvanised wave forms. Tin, iron and zinc combined and beaten thin. Weather resistant not weather proof.

Cattle as sagas. Cattle as meat. Cattle as myth. Leather and power. Fields, farms, enclosures, foreclosure. Raids and reputations.

Tombs as icons, clichés, places of pilgrimage, homes for the dead, evidence of civilization, co-operation and culture. Places of darkness, places of light. Chambers. Corbelled stone. Corbelled thoughts. Reaching for the Sun.

The absence and presence of people. The presence and absence of animals. The size and power of glossy black bulls. Dry cattle. Raw. Thick shouldered and snorting. Millions of joules. Sunlight and green grass suspended in beefy atoms. Fertility and flatulence. Prime ribs.

Against wet cattle. Nursing the next generation. The sookie calves. Them bones, them bones need calcium. Natural laws of attraction and repulsion. Tempting binaries,

the masculine, the feminine, the oppressed and the oppressor, the easy option.

The comfort of dualism, short sighted, closed minded. Harmony is complex.

All is ashes and dust and electricity.

Daniel P Callanan works outside. Connect with him on Instagram at @dpcallanan.