Under a Vaulted Sky is a long term project based in Ireland. Rowan worked closely with a small community of people and their relationship to a deconsecrated Irish convent and its abandoned gardens, all of which were marked for demolition. Her collaborators consisted of the convents’ transient residents, its previously evicted nuns and her mother who was raised in a convent. The project looks at our relationship to home, primarily the garden and our cultural repetition of the need to control land. It reflects this through the history of women in Ireland and through personal family narrative. It also considers the struggle and acceptance of those people involved, all knowing that their home and sanctuary would be soon destroyed. As a consequence a long standing, ancient link of this site with nature, worship and propagation was severed. An extensive body of work, it consists of portraits, still lives, field documentary and is intertwined with her own performative responses. This project has been created in an important time in Irish history, when it is separating itself from catholic religion and re-finding its relationship to spirituality. While this system falls apart the remnants of a pagan past can be seen emerging.
