This research-led interdisciplinary project investigates how Irish cultural identity has been constructed, aestheticised, and stabilised through museum display, state collections, and historical narratives from the late nineteenth century through the Irish Free State and into the present.

Investigating sites of cultural heritage, I am interested in questioning how objects—particularly furniture, domestic artefacts, and architectural interiors—carry ideological weight when removed from use and represented as cultural evidence.


Central to the project is a tension between romanticised national narratives and the material realities they obscure: class, scarcity, colonial inheritance, and institutional authority. The work questions how museological frameworks shape what is visible, what is omitted, and how Irish identity is rendered legible as a coherent culture.

The project is developed through sustained engagement with state-owned institutions and collections, particularly the National Museum of Ireland at Collins Barracks and the OPW-managed site of Casino Marino. These spaces function not only as sources of objects and imagery, but as active frameworks through which national identity is mediated and regulated.

Collins Barracks is approached as a site where vernacular objects—rural tools, furniture, silverware, and ecclesiastical items—are displayed outside their original contexts, often acquiring a decorative or symbolic function. Casino Marino, with its layered history as aristocratic pleasure house, institutional site, and state-maintained monument, provides a contrasting architectural context in which cultural authority, access, and exclusion are made visible.

Painting is used deliberately as a means of translating museological objects into sensorial, tactile images, emphasising surface, luminosity, and material presence. Woodworking functions both structurally and conceptually, referencing vernacular craft traditions and the material economies of scarcity that underpin much of the historical period under examination.

Critical reflection on exhibition design, cabinet-making, and display furniture forms an integral part of the methodology, informed by museum visits, critical group feedback, and curatorial models.