A fresh slice of island life

Deep in the unknown empty quarter of that country

There is a lake

and in the middle of the lake

there is an island

And in the middle

of the island

stands a mountain

And from its top

the oceans of the world

are visible:

We are less different

from each other

than islands from the land

- from Fifteen Contacts

by Macdara Woods

Poet Macdara Woods and photographer Jim Vaughan would not regard themselves as "Praegers" - Clare Island's affectionate term for curious visitors bearing binoculars and walking boots. Yet almost a century after the Victorian naturalist charted Granuaile's Clew Bay haunt, the pair from Galway and Dublin respectively have made their own distinctive record.

Robert Lloyd Praeger's approach was purely scientific in 1909, when he dispatched 100 experts in many disciplines out across the bog and glacial deposits of the 5km island. More than 8,500 organisms were identified, a percentage of which were new to science, and three years of field work were published by the Royal Irish Academy.

"Knowing how [the island] has been dissected and analysed, even during a recent scientific update of that work, the last thing I felt the islanders needed was another man off the boat with a camera," Vaughan quips. He had a very different remit when sent "in" to the island last year during the development of the island's pier by the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs. Under the State's Per Cent for Art scheme, he was commissioned to undertake a photography project, while Woods, a poet and member of Aosdána, was invited to record his own reflections.

Vaughan, who is from Roundstone, Co Galway, and lectures at Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, proposed producing a body of work that would "challenge stereotypical ideas". He believes that much visual representation of the west of Ireland's rural landscape is "steeped in cliche and stereotype".

This is particularly true of representations of island life, Vaughan believes. "Images tend to stress exotic or romanticised aspects, while neglecting the more day-to-day reality for the people living there," he explains. Thus, in workshops which he held with various groups, he encouraged the islanders to capture the familiar which would reflect their own idea of their lives.

"People tend to go for weddings, christenings, but we agreed to focus on more frequent and ordinary events - cooking dinner, walking down the road for a message," Vaughan says. "The idea was to publish a selection of the photographs taken by me and taken by the community, as a sort of insider/outsider view of Clare Island in 2006. I had worked with Macdara Woods before, and he knows the island, so he visited in his own time. His beautiful aisling, Fifteen Contacts, is the result of his own exchange with the community, and it complements the photographs every well."

The result of the collaboration is This Time, This Place, a public art project with an accompanying book that features a selection of photographs from the project and Woods's poem. The published images move from the pier and the shoreline inland to the small farms where a lamb is born, a horse is shod, a football match is played. There are snapshots of islanders at work and at play in sun, rain, wind and even snow under a big, broad Atlantic sky. The book and a matching website were put together by Zero-G design, and some 500 photographs were exhibited last September in the island's community hall before a final cut. Each of the 140 islanders received a hardback copy of the book and some 1,000 softback copies were also printed for distribution by Mayo County Council.

• Copies ofThis Time, This Place are available from the Mayo Council Arts Office, tel: 094 9047561 or e-mail: mayoarts@mayococo.ie .