I set up curator.ie in 2010 as a vehicle for innovative freelance curatorial projects with a strong public engagement component and collaborative ethos. Since then I’ve specialised in bringing long-forgotten or overlooked photographic archives/collections into the public domain, usually through exhibitions curated in partnership with arts and heritage organisations.

Along the way I curated several landmark projects that have transformed the history of social documentary photography in Ireland. That’s a big claim, but consider the following: In 2010 I curated the first ever exhibition of the photography of John Millington Synge. That led to the groundbreaking ‘Head-Hunter’ project featuring the photograph albums Charles R. Browne, a side effect of which was a ten-year campaign (2013-2023) with Marie Coyne that forced Trinity College Dublin to repatriate the “stolen skulls” of Inishbofin.

The Inishbofin saga was wrapped in a PhD project about the skull-measuring business in Ireland in the 1890s. As night follows day, the book that followed examined the relationship between power, the knowledge production business and institutional anthropology through a radical new telling of the work of Alfred Cort Haddon (1855-1940) in Ireland in the 1890s.

There were many other equally innovative projects during this time, all built around public engagement with photographic archives as a new way of making art/history and the whole shebang meaningful. The last was the Rushes | Luachair exhibition in February 2026, a life affirming, multimedia experiment featuring moving image artwork by Lisa Fingleton, Laura Fitzgerald (curator), Bláithín Mac Donnell, Lorraine Neeson and Marieke Vanmechelen. Somewhere in all that analogue and situational magic I remembered why it was I became a curator. 

If this sounds retrospective, it is to the extent that I have spent 2026 re-orientating my work as curator towards a more personal engagement with what it means to be a content creator. Working in the gig economy has a relentless energy around project development, funding cycles and delivery and, as a consequence, the quirkier elements often get left behind – like rushes in the boggy field or, given the work I do,  the out-takes on the cutting room floor.

It’s time to look again at some of these stories … and have some fun with them. That means this website will become more about the personal process of curating content and less of a platform for pitching project to funders.