The project builds upon ongoing research into the spatial staging, aura, and power relationships inherent in ethnographic and historical museums. Using text and imagry to construct a disturbing impressionsitic narrative, the work references dark traces of colonial histroy that still resonate in such spaces.

The contribution presents text derived from the research paper'Patients with Hippocampal amnesia cannot imagine new experiences' by Cardiff University and University College London (2006), alongside a reproduction of part of the artist's series He Cried in a Whisper at Some Image, at Some Vision. The scripts named in the title portray two subjects each imagining the scenario of a fictional museum visit. One of the subjects, suffering from an acute memory disorder, fails to fully construct the imagined museum space and the visit's connecting narrative.

In parallel to his work for the upcoming solo exhibition this brief visual pattern, the artist engaged in periodic online correspondence with curator Pádraic E. Moore and academic Friedrich von Bose, around varied themes (including cinema, Russian Futurism, time travel and museology) tangentally related to the creation of the exhibition. An edited selection of this conversation was published by Pallas Project as a booklet.

With thanks due for financial assitance to the Goethe Institute (Dublin).

The Reading Room is a curatorial project with the aim to maintain, archive and represent products of contemporary art practices evolving within printed and published formats. The project presents a selection of over 75 artist's publications (books, zines, magazines and newspapers) and related projects (such as fold-out posters or published audio projects), from a range of internationally based artists, both established and emerging. In addition to providing spaces for direct engagement with the materials in, assosiated artists are regularly invited for discussions, presentations and performances, and the Reading Room curators engage in lecture-performances in other locations on behalf of the project. To date the Reading Room has staged events and exhibitions in Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Dublin and Birmingham.

[The Reading Room website]

Above: Manifestation in Grand Union, Birmingham,
United Kingdom (2012)
Below: Manifestation in Flutgraben, Berlin,
Germany (2011)

Commissioned in 2007 by Carlow County Council’s Visualise programme of temporary public art projects, I invited artist Sarah Browne to consider an art project around the topic of economies, instigated by the closure of the local Sugar Factory, a major employer in the area. The artist developed a magazine for free distribution on the connections between the global and the local in the changing conceptualisation and consumption of landscapes driven by the evolving dynamics of the international sugar trade. A launch event was planned which performed the distribution of the magazine as a commercial promotion event in the central hall of a newly constructed shopping centre

Right: Launch event of the magazine, Carlow Shopping Centre (2007)

Commissioned in 2006 to curate a project funded by Carlow County Council’s Percent-for-Art scheme, I invited Glann Loughran, and artist and Social-Pedagogue who normally worked with inner-city youth, to make a project focusing on issues of concern to rural teenagers. Loughran proposed building temporary school building/youth centre and conducting a socially- pedagogical art summer school, exploring topics such as identity, ethics, relationships and concepts of the local and the foreign. In collaboration with a range of local actors, resources and work-time were donated to construct over one weekend a one-room school- building from straw-bale and other materials typically associated as being ‘rural’. A six-week summer school programme was engaged upon, ending in a large closing event and exhibition.

Right: On-site at Hedgeschool project, Bagnelstown (2006)