Rinn Aun

Photography: Mark Henderson

Rinn Aun

This exhibition, funded by the Design & Crafts Council of Ireland, showcases artist Susan Leen’s process of designing her artist book, Rinn Aun – The Place of the Tide, highlighting how art and design create opportunities for connection, understanding, and change. The book examines the neighbourhood of Ringsend and its relationship with its maritime environment. Leen’s project uses letterpress typography and linocut designs to portray the stories and memories of local inhabitants and the present-day situation of the bay area, collected through weeks of interviews. The book is printed letterpress on the National Print Museum’s Vandercook No. 4 and bound using traditional techniques.
The exhibition will be in the National Print Musuem from November 12th - February 1st.

The book and a limited edition of prints are available to buy in the National Print Musuem or by contacting: susanleen@gmail.com
https://www.nationalprintmuseum.ie/product/rinn-aun-the-place-of-the-tide-by-susan-leen/

Exhibition text

Rinn Aun – the place of the tide

Introduction

Artist Susan Leen has often found inspiration for her work in narratives of placemaking and how topography affects and creates culture. This interest led her to investigate the geography of nearby Ringsend, its maritime culture and biosphere.Through research and informal interviews with local residents, a picture emerged of a location with an intrinsic connection to its sea life, whose communities are striving to overcome ecologic issues that have threatened this connection. Leen chose to
create a linocut and letterpress printed book to portray this complex relationship and celebrate the rich maritime culture of Ringsend.

Making the book

“I chose the book form as a medium to respond to the area and the research I had
undertaken, distilled to a series of expanding narrative images between figuration
and abstraction. The project echoes the emerging mindset of the Symbiocene,
where humans exist in harmony with nature, a new way to talk about our climate
crisis in a manner that empowers people and builds capacity for future generations.
I prepared the illustrated panels for my book by hand-carving lino sheets, inspired by
the characteristics of Dublin Bay’s biosphere. Accompanying the visuals are a series
of haiku. The haiku form, with its emphasis on nature and the economy of words,
appealed to me, as did the exercise of reducing something as multifaceted as a
place to its most basic elements. The type is set by hand in Rockwell, and both the
type and linocut illustrations are printed on the National Print Museum’s Vandercook
no. 4 cylinder press.
I handbound the book, creating the covers using Fabriano no. 5 paper and archival
materials. The concertina format evokes the notion of movement and change in the
area, with one side representing the historical reality and the other representing the
contemporary situation.
The thread running through this exhibition and book project is one of community,
beginning with the Museum where I learned to set type and operate the Vandercook
press, to the wider community of people I spoke to about the project and who helped
me gather stories, to those who assisted me with writing the haiku and bookbinding.”
– Susan Leen

Ringsend and the sea

Before the North and South Walls were built to create a safe entry to Dublin Port,
Ringsend was a thin sand bank formed by the tidal waters of the rivers Dodder and
Liffey. Evidence of its relationship with the local sea life is scattered throughout the
historical record; the listing of fish as a permissible unit for church donations in 1546;
the local women who harvested Poolbeg oysters and sold them in the Dublin
markets in the 18 th century; the 1892 founding of the Pembroke Technical and
Ringsend Fishery School; Joyce’s depiction in Ulysses of Ringsend as a place of
‘wigwams of brown steersmen and master mariners.’
The placenames of Ringsend also demonstrate this heritage – most directly its Irish
name, Rinn Aun, ‘the place of the tide.’ The area also earned the nickname
‘Raytown’ due to the abundance of stingrays and their role as a food staple for
fishermen who sold off their more valuable catch.
With the desertion of the herring shoals from Dublin Bay by the turn of the century,
the dredging of Dublin port in 1903, and the domination of new steam trawlers in the
area, Ringsend began to be untethered from its maritime identity and access to the
sea. Pollution largely emptied the area of its once-eponymous stingrays, and fishing
activities re-centred in Howth.
Today, geo-engineering experiments strive to protect the Dublin Bay biosphere. The
Nautical Trust was established in 1996 to ensure the passing on of knowledge and
skills, encouraging young people to imagine a future in the maritime sector. The
Trust’s director, Jimmy Murray, pilots the Liffey Sweeper, a vessel designed to collect
non-natural debris from the Liffey, the Dodder and the Tolka Estuary. Thanks to these
efforts, the ecosystem is improving, and the long-absent herring miraculously
returned to Dublin Bay two years ago. There is great hope that the centuries-
spanning relationship of the Ringsend community with its sea life will be preserved
for future generation

susan leen

‘I am a visual artist working in expanded drawing, printmaking, ephemeral installation and social practice. My work interrogates place, and how the topography and geography of a site can inform and create culture.’