Banned by the Irish Censorship Board on its release in 1960, Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls contained subject matter deemed too sexually and morally perverse to be consumed by the Irish public. It is widely acknowledged that the influence of the Catholic Church was a contributing factor to the ban. The narrative of the novel follows Kate and Baba who grow up in rural western Ireland, board at a strict convent school and eventually make their way to the capital, Dublin.
The goal of my project Verses for Country Girls is to engage the reader in the act of uncovering the story of Kate and Baba while emphasising the contrast between 1950s Ireland and the Ireland of today. Early research investigated the types of media available to young people of the 1950s and young people of 2017. The dawn of the digital age inspired several considerations on how to best bring the reader from printed page to screen before the relationship between pocket prayer books and pocket mobile devices was ultimately explored.
Challenges were met in combining the visual language of religious texts with mobile web pages, and incorporating technological cues into traditional, religious media. The 60 years of societal change are reflected in the dialogue between the different components. The colour scheme, typefaces and initial appearance of the piece moves from the 1950s into the present, while the screen elements, digital passwords and coded web elements look back from the present day, towards the era of The Country Girls. Quotations, taken directly from O'Brien's classic and the Bible, have been dissected and curated to allow the reader to make their own personal connections to other issues beyond this piece.
While presented on a sizable church pew, the book of verses and accompanying mobile site are intentionally small in scale, a nod at the secretive and underhand nature of the ban placed upon the original novel, and the secrecy that we ourselves can carry around in our personal mobile devices. Overall, I hope that the connections, be they typographic or content-based, create a renewed value around O'Brien's ground-breaking work as it currently exists in an Ireland hugely changed since the novel's original publishing.
Dan Eames is a student at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin
daneames.com/versesforcountrygirls
behance.net/gallery/51667813/Verses-for-Country-Girls
