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innovation in research & project management
I set up curator.ie in 2010 as a vehicle for innovative curatorial projects with a strong educational component and a collaborative ethos. The emphasis gradually began to shift from contemporary visual arts and media projects to an engagement with historical social documentary photography.
This started out as a search for “authentic” representation of folklife in Ireland in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, which inevitably involved engaging with the communities who had been documented.
Gearóid Cheaist Ó Catháin and Dáithí De Mórdha standing in front of a photograph taken of Gearóid shortly after the Great Blasket Island was evacuated in 1953.
This was built around a series of critically-acclaimed touring exhibitions that drew on little-known collections of photography, beginning with John Millington Synge, Photographer (2009), followed by The Irish Headhunter, the Photograph Albums of Charles R. Browne (2012-) and An Island Portrait (2013), a visual history of the Blasket Island community told through a combination of family and ethnographic photographs.
The “Headhunter” and “Blasket” projects were developed with Dáithí De Mórdha and involved extensive networks of institutional and individual partnerships. These projects were complemented by curatorial work on exhibitions by Chris Rodmell, who documented Inis Meáin in 1973, and Eamon Mac Coistealba, who documented the island in 1942. These projects were developed by Tarlach and Áine De Blacam of Cniotáil Inis Meáin, who hosted the Synge exhibition in 2009.
Looking for relatives in the photographs Eamon Mac Coistealba’s took on Inis Meáin in the Aran Islands in 1942.
www.curator.ie on location: Peadar Mór Ó Conghaile, Ciarán Walsh, and Muiris Ó Conghaile taking a break during filming on Inis Meáin (photo: Chris Rodmell).
becoming an anthropologist
These exhibitions culminated in a five-year research project involving a complex partnership between the Irish Research Council (IRC), Maynooth University’s Dept of Anthropology (MU), Trinity College Dublin’s School of Medicine (TCD), and Shanahan Research Group (SRG). This project was triggered by the discovery of a collection of photographs that were taken in the Aran Islands by Andrew Francis Dixon and Alfred Cort Haddon, a project that involved the use of advanced photographic technologies and constituted the beginning of socio-cultural, visual anthropology.
This phase of the project concluded in January 2020, when I defended my research and was awarded a PhD, an event that signalled the final shift from visual arts to socially-engaged, visual anthropology as the basis of my work as a curator, antgropologist and project manager.
This project now enters a really exciting post-doc phase and the priority is placing my research into the public domain across a range of platforms and media: conferences, journal articles, blogs, books and film.
current research / publications
www.curator.ie is managed by Ciarán Walsh.
It was designed by Rob Condon of Kerrynet Solutions.
