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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 Eamon Mac Coistealba’s photographs of 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 and project manager.

Installation of an exhibition of the photographic archive of the Irish Ethnographic Survey (1892-1900) in the National Museum of Ireland: Country Life.

Alfred Cort Haddon took these photographs during the inaugural ethnographic survey of the Aran Islands. He noted that ‘Faherty refused to be measured, and the women would not even tell us their names.’ It was a rare acknowledgement of resistance to ethnographers by people of interest to them (© Trinity College Dublin).

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. That work is well underway.

Alongside that, I will be developing a number of curatorial projects under the banner of Project 2020 Vision, the first of which is a visual ethnography of the folk theatre movement that developed in County Kerry in the 1960s and thrived for over three decades.

This project will be developed in partnership with Pat Ahern, the leader of that movement. I worked with Pat in the 1990s and, in 2004, he came out of retirement to work with me on an installation and performance by the artist Ron van der Noll, whose work CONTRAPUNTI was inspired by the renowned Sligo fiddler Michael Coleman.

Mike O’Shea accompanying Pat Ahern, who is playing Michael Coleman’s fiddle, and artist Ron van der Noll, who is playing a string instrument he created in memory of Coleman. All three accompanied a 1934 recording of Coleman playing Tarbolton, The Longford Collector, and the Sailor’s Bonnet on the same fiddle (stills from CONTRAPUNTI: a film by Ron van der Noll, 2004).

Pat approached me in 2019 to see if I could give him a hand with his archive. It seemed a logical place to start applying the skills I have developed as a curator, researcher, writer, film maker, and project manager.

Project 2020 Vision

Ciarán Walsh filming a conversation between Jude Kelly, founder of  Women of the World Festival (WOW) and Pat Ahern, founder of Siamsa Tíre, the National Folk Theatre of Ireland (photo: Ciarán Walsh, 14-02-2020).

FOLK: an ethnography of a community who built a theatre in North Kerry will develop key themes in my doctoral research and the relationship between my post-doc work and the FOLK project was neatly realised during my first tentative conversation with the Ahern brothers, Pat and Dan.

Dan showed me a photograph from the family archive of his brother Pat dressed in a cóta beag, the petticoat that young boys wore in the west of Ireland. It was very similar to a photograph that Haddon and Dixon took in the Aran Islands in 1890. That photograph is, in many ways, the cornerstone of my doctoral research and the curatorial work that I have been engaged in for the past decade.

The circle had closed.

www.curator.ie is managed by Ciarán Walsh. 

It was designed by Rob Condon of Kerrynet Solutions.