Bold Writing

Bold Writing is a collaboration with writer and poet Máighréad Medbh. It is a response in poetry and visual art to a copybook in Vere Foster’s ‘Bold Writing’ or ‘Civil Service’ series, found in Mountjoy Prison in the late 1990’s. The video work explores the paradox of the colonial position, in which the subject population is allowed freedom only within the prevailing mindset. The incongruity of a beggar, in prison for petty theft, learning a beautiful hand script while writing that she ‘must deserve before [she] can desire’ is highlighted by the image of a hand copying the proverbs, but rendering them as dialogic anagrams.