Projects
From Charlemont to Parnell
Dual-channel moving image 12 mins 47 seconds, sound, purpose-built architectural installationMFA Degree Show, Rua Red, Dublin
Longlisted for the RDS Visual Art Awards 2026
From Charlemont to Parnell is a research-led installation examining the ways Irish cultural identity is constructed and represented through images, historical narratives and institutional forms of display. Developed from research into Irish material culture, ethnology and museum collections, the work brings together a dual-channel moving-image installation within a purpose-built architectural structure that borrows from the visual
language of the museum and exhibition space.
The moving-image work draws on archival material, historical artefacts and ethnographic research, placing these sources alongside staged contemporary images and fictionalised encounters. Historical figures including Charles Stewart Parnell and the First Earl of Charlemont appear as recurring cultural signifiers, while excerpts from the writings of Swedish ethnologist Åke Campbell introduce an external historical perspective on Irish rural life and identity.
Rather than presenting a coherent account of Irishness, the work brings different representations into proximity: historical and contemporary, institutional and vernacular, internal and external. Through repetition, juxtaposition and humour, these fragments point towards cultural identity as something continually produced, inherited and reinterpreted.
The work is housed within a freestanding architectural structure designed and constructed specifically for the exhibition. Its white walls, laminate flooring and wall-mounted monitors adopt the familiar visual codes of institutional display, while the exposed timber framework at the rear reveals the structure as temporary and constructed.
This movement between façade and support structure extends the concerns of the moving images themselves: the installation presents the museum not as a neutral container, but as another system through which cultural narratives are framed and given authority.
Figures, images and narratives similarly recur across the work without resolving into a single historical account. Parnell, Charlemont and Campbell are invoked alongside contemporary images and performed personas, allowing different periods and modes of representing Irish identity to interrupt one another. The work uses moments of awkwardness and humour to approach the instability of these categories without attempting to resolve them.
The project developed alongside my MFA thesis, Displaying the Nation: Furniture, Ideology, and Irish Cultural Identity in the Free State, which examined the representation of Irish cultural identity through material objects and their display within state cultural institutions.
Research for the wider project encompassed historical artefacts and museum collections, including Irish vernacular furniture and the work of Eileen Gray and James Hicks, alongside archival photography, moving-image archives and historical ethnographic accounts. This research became a source material rather than a history to be reproduced directly, allowing objects, images and texts to move between their original contexts and the constructed space of the installation.
Paramount to the development and outcome of this work was collaboration with many kind and talented people who were integral in helping me realise not only the film work but the installation work also. With special thanks to Aindriú O’Deasún, Jack Healy, Anne Marie Kelly, Darragh Kelly, Vaunnie Murphy, Linda Ryan, Lena Willryd and Harriet Yakub; as well as Hugh McCarthy and the other technicians in Rua Red.
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