Peace be with you
Jayne McSwiney
Peace be with you,
Plastic bullet, concrete sleeper, 2025.
Pieces from a single plastic bullet, fired near me during the 1996 Derry riots, are laid in a line across a concrete sleeper.
Over 29 years, this bullet has broken down naturally into hundreds of pieces.
These bullets were designed to be fired at the ground, to bounce and hit below the head. In riot zones, that ground was often concrete, council estate walls, bitumen roads. Hard, grey surfaces that absorbed impact, violence, memory.
The bullet placed in a soft line recalls a border, a scar, a riot line, a barricade, a threshold crossed.