
Irish Monuments Project Logbook by Zea Morvitz
For my residency at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in County Mayo, Ireland in 2016, my husband and I created a project to study and record a few of the many Neolithic structures in the vicinity of the residency. The "monuments" range from standing stones to chambered tombs. Built about 5000 years ago, they have been weathering in place ever since, becoming part of the natural landscape. Our project included keeping a logbook I made for the purpose to record location, time of visit, weather, plus a sketch or site plan and other notes. At each site I made a graphite rubbing of one stone to use in a series of large scale drawings. I scanned our original logbook, added the site photos for this small, open edition. Megalithic monuments are among the earliest built structures surviving. Crafted and built with few tools, they are both mute and expressive, almost all that is left of the pre-literate society that made them. Our logbook records our encounters with these structures.