Ash Scribe


Oghams Talking


[Earthwork; Sculpture][2024]
Emerging from a profound and layered period of grief, I felt pulled towards ritual and ceremony as a means to transform the energy of loss. Without a cultural framework for tending to grief, I turned to my pagan Celtic ancestors, who communicated using Ogham, the earliest written language. They inscribed the names of their loved ones on large stones that stood amidst the Irish landscape, a place both lush and bleak.

These carved standing stones testified to the power of ritual. They evidenced wild and natural ceremonies: bare feet stomping the earth, bodies writhing in grief-stricken madness, and keening—ritual weeping rites.

Inspired by these Ogham stones, I created monuments for my grief, crafting temples where my sorrow could live. These forms allowed different types of grief to coexist: the grief for a grandfather I never knew beside grief for my child self, the grief of modern society's disconnection from ancestry alongside grief for Palestine.

Where multiple stones stand together, they form constellations of grief, generating an electric energy in the spaces between them. These gaps hold energetic connections from one grief object to the next, suggesting that from within the grief, there is room for other types of energy— untold stories and wider truths unveiling a deeper capacity for hope, creation, and belonging. 



Reference Images (locations left-to-right) [Dingle Peninsula]; [Killala]; [County Carlow]




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