A Callus Island

A Callus Island is a dermal sculpture made from my skin during emigration from Ireland due to the lack of livable employment, and housing. Measuring just 2.3cm by 1.2cm this miniature monument recreates the island of Ireland on a shaving taken from the callus, hardened foot skin formed while working abroad.

Installed on the leather stage of a digital microscope, the magnified cut-out of skin is expanded on an LCD screen unveiling the unseen ridges and roads of the microscopic land. Swollen hills and cavernous craters expand like an alien world seen through a cosmic telescopic. Dead yet alive, the familiar becomes a foreign place, forecasting a path of ecological dangers bounding towards a drowning island.

As an Irish generation leaves it’s home in search of a quality of life it’s own country cannot provide, A Callus Island provides an honest depiction of a land carved into the skin of it’s citizens, but one that they no longer stand on.

The skin isle dissects the Irish state’s role in facilitating the emigration of it's youngest generations, while questioning the dissonant system we breath, sleep, live. The effects of neo-liberal legislation on our collective ecosystem is spot lit under a microscope that depicts both an ancient, primordial land, and a barren future with no one to call it home. This lonely speck of island amplifies the cosmological intricacies that exist within each millimeter of it's inhabitant’s skin, and the speculative results of what is possible when something living becomes disconnected from the source, the hub, the home.

When exhibiting A Callus Island within the Island of Ireland, each installation is unique as Kevin pinpoints and magnifies the location it is installed in. The photos above were captured at R-Space Gallery in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, and examine the gallery’s location on the micro-map.