Eimear Walshe: ROMANTIC IRELAND

Eimear Walshe’s work traces the legacies of late 19th century land contestation in Ireland and its relation to private property, sexual conservatism, and the built environment. While their research is deeply grounded in the specificities of the Irish context, the historical and cultural forces it describes resonate transnationally. Their practice speaks to the violence, humiliations and losses of colonisation – and tells parallel stories of complicity, disavowal and betrayal. ROMANTIC IRELAND comprises a multi-channel video installation and an operatic soundtrack housed in an earth-built sculpture. The video stages soapy, melodramatic encounters between character archetypes from the 19th to 21st centuries. These figures occupy an abstracted ruin, a site under simultaneous construction and demolition. Made in the shadow of the ongoing housing crisis in Ireland, the installation in ROMANTIC IRELAND becomes variously, a building site of possibility; a wrestling ring for Ireland’s generational and class antagonisms; a space of tender care, and a structure made into a cold ruin by the social death of eviction. The exhibition forces encounters between historic moments, drawing out their parallel power dynamics and affective registers; their forms of labour, conflict and pleasure, and the entangled histories of sexuality, property and the state.