Jackie Flanagan Visual Artist

Materialising the Undead

The paper-sculpture entitled Materialising the Undead is based on a concept that I call Vampirian Hauntology. This merges Bram Stoker's vampire with Jacques Derrida's hauntology. In this fictitious world-building framework, the past returns to haunt the present through the undead.

The sculpture simultaneously represents the subconscious and Neolithic cosmological architecture. The outward-facing circle layers of the paper-sculpture represent imagination and logic, while the inner layers are more akin to the dusty chambers of the subconscious. Inside the body of the sculpture are layers of charcoal-rendered paper inscribed with lines. These marks conceptually represent channelled mark-making - a process in which the mark is a conduit for the dead, containing our ancestral ghosts and their memories. These marks are made visible through punctuated voids on the surface of the paper-sculpture. The channelled lines are fed from the framing paper fragments of ancestral ghosts, which surround the circles.

Whereas Stoker's vampire drains life, this vampiric sculpture circulates it; a reversal enacted through light, marks, and the red arterial threads.

Unlike the typical law of the vampire, light is healing. Through illumination, inherited societal-historical traumas are processed as buried ghosts become re-animated, in effect constituting a society of the undead. This is similar to the solstice sun entering through voids and activating Neolithic inner chambers by bouncing off inscribed marks in stone - symbolically reawakening the dead. 

Each mark on the paper layers can be interpreted as imbued with Stoker's own ghosts of Irish hauntology. Maybe his lived experience of famine and language draining may have inspired his gothic motifs of emaciation and blood draining in Dracula? 

The red threads in the vampiric sculpture enact the cardiovascular system, where arteries pump an ancestral bloodline into the sculpture's body. 

The paper-sculpture is sealed with acrylic polymer in a literal act of materialising the undead.