Fan Linn – Turas Úr Festival, Inishbofin Island, Donegal, Ireland
Performance by Olivia Hassett
This series of photographs documents the performance of artist Olivia Hassett, created on the harbour edge of the deserted island of Inishbofin. The work unfolds as a calling across the sea toward the mainland—an invocation shaped by memory, absence, and ancestral trace.
Drawing on the archetype of the warrior, Hassett enters the landscape as a conduit for remembrance. Her performance evokes the lives of island communities who endured isolation, elemental conditions, and eventual forced relocation to the mainland. The body becomes both witness and vessel, holding these layered histories within the present moment.
Rooted in the ritual practice of Imbas Forasnai, the work is constructed through acts of gathering and transformation. Earth, ash, water, and salt—sourced from both island and mainland—are drawn into the performance. These materials are poured, marked, and carried across skin and ground, dissolving boundaries between body and landscape.
Ogham inscriptions are traced upon the body and inscribed into the earth, functioning as both language and gesture. Through these acts, Hassett calls outward to the sea and to those present, inviting a shared process of remembrance. The audience is drawn into a reflective space, asked to consider their own ancestral connections and the ways in which identity is shaped by place, history, and displacement.
Fan Linn becomes a threshold space—between land and water, past and present—where performance, ritual, and landscape converge, and where memory is actively reanimated through embodied action.
Fan Linn – Turas Úr Festival, Inishbofin Island, Donegal, Ireland
Performance by Olivia Hassett
