Ciarán Walsh

Director | www.curator.ie

Ciarán Walsh was born in Newry in 1959 and grew up in Cork. He moved to Dublin in 1977 and worked as an Executive Officer in the Dept of Justice, resigning in 1981 to attend NCAD. He graduated in 1984 with a BA in Art and Design Education. He set up Base 10 (Ballymun Community Arts) in 1984 before taking up a position as Art Teacher in Pobalscoil Rosmini, Drumcondra in 1896, specialising in developing an art syllabus for visually impaired boys. He returned to Cork in 1988 and set up the Arts Education Workshop in Cork Teachers’ Centre, a one-year pilot funded by the Arts Council and Gulbenkian Foundation (London). He joined Triskel Arts Centre in 1989 as the first education officer appointed by arts centre in Ireland and moved on to the Arts Council, where he served as Education Officer from 1992-5, a critical phase in the development of the arts in Ireland. He then joined Siamsa Tíre as Visual Arts Director and managed the gallery there until 2010, when he set up www.curator.ie.

Since then, he has focussed on social documentary photography collections in various archives, building upon the success of his internationally acclaimed exhibition of John Millington Synge’s photography with the equally ground-breaking “Irish Head–hunter” project, funded by the Heritage Council and the OPW. This involved digitising and exhibiting a little-known collection of photographs taken by anthropologists in the west of Ireland in the 1890s. RTÉ News reported it as one of the most important archives to have ever entered the public domain (link). Further research funded by the Heritage Council uncovered equally important archives in Cambridge and the discovery of the Haddon-Dixon photographic collection in TCD in 2014 led to an Irish Research Council funded PhD with Maynooth University, which included a three-year work placement as a digital resource developer with Kimmage Development Studies Centre. 

Ciarán Walsh at work on the Haddon Papers in the Manuscript Dept, Cambridge University Library in 2017.

Walsh was awarded a PhD in June 2020 and, in 2021, Berghahn Books commissioned a monograph on Alfred Cort Haddon, a Victorian ethnologist, humanitarian activist, and photographer who was the first person to photographically document the lives of the Aran Islanders. His research and activism is one of three interwoven stories that feature in Iarsmaí (Remains), by Dearcán Media for TG4 and BBC Northern Ireland, his story revolving around a public engagement project with three communities in the west of Ireland and the Provost’s office in TCD. Other projects include ongoing development work on two freelance, oral history projects that were interrupted by the pandemic. In July, Walsh started an eight-week programme of work as  archivist/curator on the Ann Doherty Project developed by Donegal County Council Archive Services and County Museum with funding from the Heritage Council’s Heritage Stewardship Fund.

Memberships

History of Anthropology Network

Fellow, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland

European Association of Social Anthropologists.

Haddon Dixon Repatriation Project

List of Recent/Forthcoming Publications

Journalism:

RTE Brainstorm (https://www.rte.ie/author/1158476-ciaran-walsh/)

2022. “How the roots of Riverdance can be found in Kerry,” selected for broadcast as podcast (link).

2021. “Don’t kick that skull or the dead will come after you!” (link).  

2021. “The case of the missing skulls from Inishbofin” (link).

2020. “Why does Kerry have a lower rate of Covid-19 than other counties?” (link)

2020. “The head-hunter who measured Irishmen’s skulls,” selected for broadcast as podcast (link).

Walsh. 2020. “The Victorian Curator who Railed against Racism and Imperialism.” The Irish Independent Review, June 20, 2020, p. 10 (link).

Academic Publications

2021. “Anarchy in the UK: Haddon and the anarchist agenda in the Anglo-Irish folklore movement” in Folklore and nation in Britain and Ireland edited by Matthew Cheeseman and Carina Hart. London: Routledge Talylor Francis (link)

2022. “Alfred Cort Haddon, Artist, Philosopher and Activist.” Bérose International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology (August).

2023. Alfred Cort Haddon: a very English savage (in Ireland). New York: Berghahn Books.

Documentary / Film

2022-23. Iarmsaí, A film by Damien McCannProduced by Rosie McNally. Devised by Deaglán Ó Mochain, Dearcån Media, Derry, for TG4/BBC Northern Ireland.

Personal

Ciarán Walsh approaching the Great Blasket Island. Photo by Padraig O’Donoghue.

Ciarán Walsh is  married and lives near the village of Ballyheigue in the south west of Ireland. He is a mountaineer, a kayaker and an occasional cyclist.