Fighting With Shadows - 2019

“No part of this island was left unscathed; the soil holds the memories.” - Tracy Sweeney

Fighting With Shadows

Fighting with Shadows is a body of work exploring Irish emigration, migration, identity and the enduring legacy of the Great Famine. Commissioned for the collection of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University, Connecticut, the project emerged from an extraordinary story of place, memory and return.

The commission began with an American family, the Kings, whose roots lie in Straide, County Mayo, who connected with Sweeney in 2017. Two walls of the original King family home still stand in the field beside Sweeney’s studio. In the 1920s, Bridget King left this place carrying a single trunk of belongings to begin a new life in New Haven, Connecticut. She married another Mayo emigrant and never returned to Ireland, nor did she speak of it to her children.

Decades later, her family brought that trunk back to Mayo, completing a remarkable journey and reconnecting with a place that had remained largely untouched by time.

Straide is the birthplace of Michael Davitt (an Irish Republican activist for Home Rule and land reform). It is a landscape marked by emigration and loss, where Sweeney’s work draws upon the ruined walls of the King family cottage, the broken stones and moss-covered surfaces that remain as witnesses to another age. As Sweeney says “across Mayo, abandoned cottages still stand in fields and along roadsides, each carrying its own memory. The landscape itself seems to hold the traces of those who departed and those who remained.”

“I cannot portray the full horrors of that period, but through these paintings I hope to honour what was left behind and to acknowledge the profound act of migration that shaped so many Irish families. The soil remembers. The ruined walls remain. And within them are stories that continue to echo across generations and across oceans.”
— Tracy Sweeney

A small selection of Sweeneys’ paintings are part of the permanent collection at Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, soon to be exhibited at its new home, in Fairfield, Connecticut.

Following the death of Bridget, her daughter Nancy, spent much of her time visiting Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum in Hamden Connecticut and the family sought to honour Nancy’s memory by commissioning a painting for the museum’s permanent collection. They were struck by the coincidence that Tracy’s studio in Straide, in Mayo stands beside the ruins of the home which Bridget once left behind.

The title, Fighting with Shadows, comes from a recorded statement made by a Mayo famine victim. Under British rule, much had been taken from the Irish people: their land, their language, their religion and even the light in their homes, as families were taxed according to the number of windows they possessed. Describing the sense of helplessness and oppression, one man remarked that it felt as though they were “fighting with shadows.”

That phrase became the emotional foundation of this body of work.

  • Leaving

  • Tethered Passage

  • Tracy Sweeney at IGHM

  • Atlantic Drift

  • "“No part of this island was left unscathed; the soil holds the memories.”

    —Tracy Sweeney