Artist Anna Marie looks back at her work over the years

​I am a visual artist who lives in the village of Omeath, Co. Louth, Ireland.

I was born in 1966 and am a Fine Art graduate of the University of Ulster, where I received a First-Class Honours Degree in 2009. A core thread that weaves through my work is a probing of identity, ranging from the personal through to the cultural and political sometimes albeit in a romanticized, reminiscent concept.

I have come to realise how the effect of a geographical location can have on the emotions and behaviour of the individual and how this relatable connection to the land and, this ever-present psychogeography has now become apparent within my own practice.

Growing up in the border town of Newry, Co. Down in the 1970s and 1980s I was always fascinated by the Army Watchtowers which were located along the border and, in particular, the icon imagery that has been left behind, now that the watchtowers have been dismantled.

In 2019 I was accepted for Drawn from Borders which was part of the Understanding the Decade of Centenaries project, supported by the European Union’s Peace IV Programme, which asked visual artists to respond to the concept and reality of borders, specifically the border created 100 years ago by the Partition of Ireland.

In 2021, I was selected to show her work, Semtex and Powdered Milk at the RCC, Letterkenny. Frontier Work was a four-person collaborative project curated by historian Garret Carr which was part of the ‘Decade of Centenaries’ project supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and Artlink, Fort Dunree, Donegal. For this project I commissioned a drone photographer to capture images of the now decommissioned thirteen army watchtower sites based along the south Armagh border.

Newry and Mourne Museum’s latest exhibition, Newry Artists Past and Present shows two of my paper pieces from the series, Túír Faire (Watchtowers). I used to walk past a ‘watchtower’ structure almost every day in my local village and photographed it in every type of light, weather and season. It was actually a disused, tall climbing tower in the old Táin Village Holiday Centre, Omeath, Co. Louth but reminded me of the old army watchtowers I used to see as a child when I crossed the border at Cloughouge Bridge, Newry. I wanted to recreate an image incorporating the tools that the British Army would have used in surveillance from their watchtowers and experimented with different filters and played about with the photographic images. I eventually settled on a solarized filter; this is similar to the results an army thermal vision camera would have given as it detects temperature change and translated these explorations onto paper. The circle is prevalent throughout all the work as it is synonymous of the night vision camera lens used by the army.

I have continuously expanded and explored this topic for the past four years with my work Próiseas (Process) and most recently, Utopian Spaceships and I am currently collaborating on a project with Leeds University on an illicit fuels project and its damage to the environment on the Mexican, African and Irish borders.

‘Newry Artists Past and Present’ is on show at Newry and Mourne Museum until the end of April 2024.

To view more of Anna Marie Savage’s work, please visit www.annamariesavage.com.

The Museum is currently offering free tours of the main exhibition galleries on Wednesdays at 2.00 pm. These must be booked in advance by calling our Education Officer at 0330 137 4422.

Newry and Mourne Museum is open Tuesday – Saturday 10.00 am – 4.30 pm. Please call 0330 137 4422 or email [email protected] for further information.

Visit the website at www.visitmournemountains.co.uk/museums/newry-and-mourne-museum.