This website is undergoing a post-doc and book-writing refit. The work is scheduled to continue until September 30, 2022. In the meantime, apologies for typos, formatting glitches, and all other things that go bump in a situation like this.
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innovation in research & project management
Ciarán Walsh begins work on the Ann Doherty Collection in Donegal County Archives Service. Photo: Niamh Brennan, Archivist at Donegal County Council.
Ciarán Walsh set up curator.ie in 2010 as a vehicle for innovative curatorial projects with a strong public engagement component and a collaborative ethos. The emphasis quickly shifted from contemporary visual arts and media projects to an engagement with historical, social documentary photography and the stories associated with it.
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. Gearóid was the last child to live on the island and was dubbed the loneliest child in the world in a newspaper article.
In 2020, the project entered a really exciting post-doc, research and development phase. Walsh completed a PhD in anthropology and set about placing his ground-breaking research into the public domain across a range of platforms and media, using the project model he developed in a series of critically-acclaimed exhibitions. He launched the series in Inis Meáin in 2009 with John Millington Synge, Photographer, which was a big hit in Paris the following year. He followed this with The Irish Headhunter, the Photograph Albums of Charles R. Browne (2012-15), a ‘lost’ history of Victorian ethnography in Ireland. An Island Portrait (2013), a visual history of the Blasket Island community, developed out of this and led to the curation of other photographic collections connected with the Aran Islands. The discovery of a ‘lost’ collection of photographic negatives in 2014 was the starting point for a six-year project that focused on the photography of Alfred Cort Haddon, an anti-racism activist whose work on the Aran Islands anticipated many of the features of modern anthropology and, I propose, pointed Synge in the direction of the Aran Islands.
Haddon took this photograph on Inis Meáin in 1892 and added the caption “Inishmaan, Faherty refused to be measured, and the women would not even tell us their names” when he included it in “The Ethnography of the Aran Islands,” which the Royal Irish Academy published in 1893. Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, the University of Dublin.
Walsh’s work on Haddon is widely recognised as ground-breaking, not least because it went against the grain of most histories of Anglo-Irish anthropology. It also anticipated a vigorous, public engagement with colonial legacies triggered by a resurgence in the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2020. That caught the academy off-guard, but it put Walsh at the forefront of an exciting new phase in public history and the curatorial model he developed was a good fit for the current focus on public engagement with archives and a parallel movement in people’s histories.
Ciarán Walsh and Pat Ahern, founder of a folk theatre movement in Kerry, record John Lynch talking about making social documentaries in Kerry in the 1970s.
Since 2020, Walsh has written a book on Haddon that Berghahn Books commissioned in 2021 and passed for producrion in August 2022. He is working with Dearcán Media on a feature documentary for TG4 and BBC that deals with colonial legacies and features a campaign to have skulls Haddon and Dixon stole in the west of Ireland in 1890 returned by TCD to the communities of origin. He developed two oral history projects, the first with Pat Ahern (Folk) and the second with John Lynch and his film-making partner Michael Mulcahy (The Bolex Boys). He is currently working as archivist / curator on the Ann Doherty Collection for Donegal County Council Archives and is working with the team in the County Museum on the exhibition A Common Humanity scheduled to open on September 22, 2022.
Ann Doherty, 1999, Armenia: church opening in Lall after the collapse of communism, digital scan of black and white photographic negative. With permission of Donegal County Council Archive Services ©.
Caroline Carr, Donegal County Museum, Ann Doherty, photographer, and Ciarán Walsh, archivist / curator.
read more:
current research / publications
www.curator.ie is managed by Ciarán Walsh.
It was designed by Rob Condon of Kerrynet Solutions.
