This project examines how everyday life, visual culture, and aesthetic “innocence” operated alongside rising authoritarianism in Europe during the interwar period (c.1919–1939), with particular attention to how domestic objects, popular imagery, and landscape functioned as carriers of ideology.

The work asks how ostensibly apolitical forms—watercolour painting, tourism imagery, children’s toys, domestic furniture, and early mass media—participated in shaping national sentiment and cultural memory.

The project engages with museum, archival, and state collections as sites where political history is softened, aestheticised, or rendered palatable through display. Materials drawn from the National Photographic Library, Irish tourism archives, and museum-held travel posters are considered alongside international examples of fascist architecture, modernist design, and cultural propaganda.

Irish institutions are approached comparatively, positioned within a broader European context rather than as culturally isolated. This allows the project to examine parallels between Italian fascist architectural revivalism, German and Scandinavian modernism, and the Irish state’s emphasis on rural landscape, Catholic conservatism, and domestic respectability in its self-representation.

Google Maps is used as a contemporary research tool, functioning as a liminal, flattened form of place-making that echoes the utopian, sanitised imagery of tourism and propaganda. Watercolour is employed deliberately as a historically “inoffensive” medium, allowing the work to explore how softness, charm, and restraint can operate as ideological camouflage.

Rather than presenting explicit political imagery, the project stages quiet, unsettling juxtapositions that expose how cultural identity is constructed through repetition, taste, and display. The work foregrounds sentimentality as a site of tension—where affection, nostalgia, and national pride intersect with exclusionary or authoritarian impulses.

Presentation strategies draw consciously from museum vitrines and domestic interiors, inviting viewers to reflect on their own proximity to the material languages of ideology.