For me, while there are many complex issues associated with adoption, the one which I’m fascinated by is the loss of genetic and family cultural identity through this experience.

The pictures below and the story attached represents as aspect of this complexity and my expression of giving it voice through Visual art

It’s a door handle from my genetic mother ( Doreen Guirey) home in Castle Matrix. Rathkeale Co limerick. When she died she left the house to me and my genetic brother (her 2 sons) . I was living in England at the time and my brother bought out my half of the house and brought his family up there.

Soon after he moved in I visited,  he was doing renovations and the internal doors which had been in the house were laying in the garden waiting to be replaced.

When I saw the door handles on theese doors  I was immediately struck by what they symbolically represented to me;  which was a link to a past I never knew. Like as if,  in some way my finely tuned “lack of family identity radar” had found something to latch onto, in its attempt to psychologically process that which is so difficult to process but has expression and voice in the language of art.

Doreen lived in the family home, with her brother Sean and her mother and father, Minny and Paddy ( my grandparents). they had all been long dead when I first met Doreen as an adult. I never met or knew them but this handle was a tangible connection. They all at one stage had opened that door, turned that handle and their hands had left, however small, an indelible imprint and now I could connect to them through my hand on that piece of wood.  There is of course also the universal symbolism of a handle to a door which opens a room and that room can contain whatever the imagination congers.

Adoption like history is complexed and piled with layers of nuance. Its not only grandchildren who never met, connected with grandparents/family members, it also  grandparents ( other genetic  family members) who never met the generation who would supersede them and there was a loss to for them too, even if they did not realise it at the time.  This handle connects us all.