HD video
9’50”
The Old Library in Trinity College Dublin is, for the first time in its 300-year history, empty of books [in 2024]. This is in order to facilitate refurbishment designed to protect the collection from environmental hazards, particularly dust. Visited over the course of a year by nearly 780,000 people, the collection is at risk from particulate matter caused by increased tourist numbers as well as motor traffic, building deterioration, and dust from the leather binding of the books themselves.
In 1890, thirteen human skulls were stolen from Inisbofin, an island off the west coast of Ireland, by Trinity College researchers engaged in the discredited Victorian practice of craniometry, or skull measuring. After a long campaign by islanders, the skulls were returned and interred on the island in 2023, potentially setting a precedent for the return of other controversial artefacts in the college collection.
In this work, Marie Coyne, lead campaigner and keeper of the Inisbofin Heritage Museum, describes the struggle to reclaim the stolen skulls and the ceremonies that attended their eventual return.
We consider the TCD archive, after Derrida, as a place of ‘commencement’ and ‘commandment’: a domestic site of origination and authority that holds influence over public as well as official state memory. The skeletal forms of the empty bookcases evoke the human bones that remain in the college’s possession, remnants of dehumanising colonial practices. This video explores the relationship between the way decisions relating to preservation and display can shape national identities, in the context of colonialism, rising ethnonationalism and polarised public debate.
Gallery includes photograph from the series A Collection of Disarticulated Bones (2023-) and video excerpts from Part of the People and Forty-Five Seconds, both 2024.
Three short films under the title A Collection of Disarticulated Bones traverse centres of knowledge in the US, UK and Europe in order to unpick different foundation myths of the Global North: institutional, pop cultural and embodied. This longer-term project examines how decisions relating to preservation and presentation of histories can shape national and individual identities, in the context of imperialism, late capitalism, rising ethnonationalism and polarised public debate on both sides of the Atlantic.
Part of the People was made by commission for the 2024 edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, ‘The Salvage Agency’, curated by Michele Horrigan.
This research was supported in its development by Project Arts Centre, Creative Heartlands and the Arts Council of Ireland.
HD video
10’54”
On the 31st March 1993, two gardaí (local police) were driving around on late-night patrol in a small west of Ireland town when they witnessed strange lights in the sky above them. At the time, their story was taken seriously, given their social standing, and was reported in Irish media. Now retired from the force, and driving luxury vintage cars for weddings, one of the Gardaí tells his story while driving the artists to the location of the sighting.
This work reflects on how stories are told and the impact of American culture on the popular imagination in Ireland. Touching on tourism, alien invasion, bird migration and military aviation, it hints towards the fear subconsciously felt by some in the Global North that a technologically advanced alien society could come and steal land and resources, mimicking historical colonial expansion.
Gallery includes video excerpts from Forty-Five Seconds and Part of the People, both 2024.
Three short films under the title A Collection of Disarticulated Bones traverse centres of knowledge in the US, UK and Europe in order to unpick different foundation myths of the Global North: institutional, pop cultural and embodied. This longer-term project examines how decisions relating to preservation and presentation of histories can shape national and individual identities, in the context of imperialism, late capitalism, rising ethnonationalism and polarised public debate on both sides of the Atlantic.
Forty-five Seconds was made by commission for the 2024 edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, ‘The Salvage Agency’, curated by Michele Horrigan. The short previewed at 11th Adaptation Film Weekend at The Glens Centre, Manorhamilton in September 2024 and has subsequently been screened as part of CineSalon Experimental Film Festival, Cobh, Cork City and online in December 2025, and ‘A Phenomenon Only Slightly Strange’, exhibition by Cóilín O’Connell at Thkio Ppalies, Nicosia, Cyprus in January 2026.
This research was supported in its development by Askeaton Contemporary Arts, Project Arts Centre, Creative Heartlands and the Arts Council of Ireland.
HD video
12’17”
The Ulster American Folk Park is an open air museum in Co. Tyrone which uses reconstructed Irish and American buildings, interpreted by live costumed guides, to tell the story of historical Ulster migration to rural America. One dwelling in the museum’s collection stands out from the others: a large red brick house built in 1825 in Tennessee by Francis Rogan, an Irish American Catholic plantation owner and enslaver. The museum acquired the house in the 1990s and had it dismantled and shipped across the Atlantic, each brick carefully numbered.
During reconstruction, conservators discovered some bricks that held imperfections: marks left by people present when the clay bricks were drying outside. Those bricks were carefully removed for further study and preservation. One bore a handprint, and the other a bare footprint, likely belonging to a child approximately seven or eight years old who lived on the plantation two centuries ago. As the Rogan family had no children of their own at that time, it is plausible to suggest that the marks were left by an enslaved child. We imagine these imprints as stowaways. Once hidden within the walls of this house, they have now travelled across land and water to reveal themselves in present-day Ireland. The moulds, now museum artefacts, represent the connection between ourselves, our diaspora and the legacies of institutional racism that continue to afflict humanity.
Narrated by Curator of Emigration, Liam Corry, the video is structured as a palindrome, with repetitive shots of anonymous bricks building and unbuilding. We are interested in the moment of transformation: when the house is not a house but a hoard of objects, suspended in space. We picture these bricks unfurling, spinning in a great circle and coagulating again as an image of a house, rebuilt in each moment of encounter.
Gallery includes video excerpts from Brick by Brick and Stone by Stone II, both 2024.
Stone by Stone II is a silent video-loop, filmed guerrilla-style at the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park (which includes a famine-era stone cottage transposed from Achill Island to Manhattan), to accompany Brick-by-Brick.
Three short films under the title A Collection of Disarticulated Bones traverse centres of knowledge in the US, UK and Europe in order to unpick different foundation myths of the Global North: institutional, pop cultural and embodied. This longer-term project examines how decisions relating to preservation and presentation of histories can shape national and individual identities, in the context of imperialism, late capitalism, rising ethnonationalism and polarised public debate on both sides of the Atlantic.
Brick by Brick was made by commission for the 2024 edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, ‘The Salvage Agency’, curated by Michele Horrigan.
This research was supported in its development by Project Arts Centre, Creative Heartlands, The Ulster American Folk Park (National Museums of NI) and the Arts Council of Ireland.
2 x 20’ video installations
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Two silent videos consider in-between states such as twilight, passageways and coastlines, and their potential to be spaces for meditation as well as navigation. Moving between the sculpture garden of Ruth’s grandfather, Kieran Kelly, and its surrounding landscapes, the artists send and receive light signals in order to project painterly visions of the celestial and the terrestrial.
These shorts were screened, in part, accompanied a live score by Ruth and Cormac MacDiarmada at BASIC TALKS, Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane, 2018. In 2025, they were part of a showreel exhibition of our short videos at Flux Studios Project Space, Dublin, curated by Katie Kim.
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Made by commission for Carol Bellamy Collections.
8’ 01” digital video
A haunted protagonist receives transmissions from an obsolete fog horn and routinely culled fallow deer.
This short sci-fi film was completed as part of the digital media residency at Fire Station artist studios (2010-11).
Gasp at End was screened at Darklight International Film Festival, Dublin and Days on End Experimental Sound Festival, Cork (both 2012). In 2025, it was part of a showreel exhibition of our short videos at Flux Studios Project Space, Dublin, curated by Katie Kim.
11’ 09” digital video installation
Hand-made eagles are flung from a cliff in super slow-motion as a reenactment of a recent, fated conservation effort.
This video was completed as part of the digital media residency at Fire Station artist studios (2010-11).
First exhibited as part of ‘Give up the Ghost’ group exhibition at Pallas Projects / Studios. In 2025, Poison Eagle Sacrifice was part of a showreel exhibition of our short videos at Flux Studios Project Space, Dublin, curated by Katie Kim.
