IRISH GOTHIC

art, folklore, story, site

Disturbance (2011) Willie Doherty

Folklore and Irish Gothic

Mapping

The Sea

The Gothic Home

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”

(James Joyce)

Cartoons for Punch

The Irish Devilfish, The Irish Vampire, the Irish Frankenstein (Sir John Tenniel)

“I am not English,I am Irish – which is quite another thing”

(Oscar Wilde)

Sean Lynch (2006) Latoon

St Brigid’s Shrine Faughurt – the eye stone (left), the head stone (right)

Tim Robinson. Map of the Burren.

Giraldus Cambrensis -Topographia Hibernia (late 11th

century)

“I shall have to write some accounts which will seem to the

reader either utterly impossible, or quite ridiculous. But with

the help of God I will insert nothing in my book the truth of

which I have not elicited with the greatest diligence whether

from my own firm belief or the authentic testimony of the most

trustworthy men.”

(Giraldus Cambrensis)

Joe McNamara (Achill-henge 2011)

Fata Morgana (Martin Healy) 2010

A preliminary sketch for the reappearance of HyBrazil (2007) Sean Lynch

A preliminary sketch for the reappearance of HyBrazil (2007) Sean Lynch

Fergal McCarthy (2011) No Man’s Land

Surface and Surface (2012) Gary Coyle

Song of the Sea (2014) directed Tomm Moore

Castletown House 1722-29

The Cardplayers and the Devil

Poster for Prelude Speaker: Contemporary Castletown,

2013; Marianne Keating (2013) Famine Screen.

Daphne Wright(1997) They’ve Taken To Their Beds.

Dorothy Cross (2000) Endarken. Film stills.

Seamus Farrell (2008) Neo Ruin/Irish Folly

Elaine Reynolds (On/Off States 2010)

Alice Maher (House of Thorns 1992)

Palisade (2003) Alice Maher

Dominic Thorpe(20087 Its Not My Place)

Aideen Barry(2007) Levitating

Aideen Barry (2011) Possession

“Irish culture is sedimentary. By this I mean that things don’t get obliterated,

they get buried. They are covered with a new layer of history but they are

still down there, like bodies preserved in bogs. They surface in new forms,

like holy wells and holy mountains as places of Christian pilgrimage. Or they

emerge into wholly new contexts, like Fionn Mac Cumhaill waking from his

slumbers to find himself in two avant-garde 20th-century novels, James

Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds . What

Sigmund Freud called “the return of the repressed” is the very stuff of Irish

art. It is haunted by ghosts and revenants. Nothing is ever really dead”

(Fintan O’Toole)

Yellow (2008) Amanda Coogan