In the good seats: Essays on film is an arresting new collection of essays featuring some of the most talented writers working today, setting their sights on what’s so alluring and moving about film and cinema. A childhood film encountered on the big screen, a favourite celluloid instant, a resonating discovery, an awkward first date; the threadbare seats, the click and whirr of the projector, the sense of scale expanding.

Each essayist in this extensive collection unearths those particularly breathless and unforgettable moments when their lives were touched by film. Like a projection of light beaming across a darkened hall, In the good seats, pulls us closer to those flickers of magic that film and cinema usher forth.

With contributions by Darran Anderson, Maggie Armstrong, Dodie Bellamy, Susannah Dickey, Maria Fusco, Francis Halsall, Daisy Lafarge, Michael Magee, Ian Maleney, Toye Oladinni, K Patrick, Devika Ponnambalam, Ali Smith, and Cathy Sweeney.

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Publication date: March 2025
Publicity: peter@peteroconnellmedia.com
EXTS: 11 × 17.5 cm, 176 pp., 4 ills., softcover
ISBN: 978-1-9161509-6-6
Design: Daly & Lyon
RRP: €15 / £13

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The speed of a cinema film is 25 frames per second. God knows how many frames per second flicker past our daily perception. But it is as if at the brief moments I’m talking about, suddenly and disconcertingly we see between two frames. We come upon a part of the visible which wasn’t destined for us. Perhaps it was destined for — nightbirds, reindeer, ferrets, eels, whales …

– John Berger, ‘Opening a Gate’

What is it about animals? – those creatures that keep us company, a figure in a memory or folktale, the shadowy presence in a photograph, or an ancient drawing on a wall. Guides, companions, imaginary beings, hindrances, sources of fear and love …

Edited by Nathan O’Donnell, Adrian Duncan, and Niamh Dunphy, Running feet, sharp noses: Essays on the animal world is an essential collection of essays on the animal world. Each piece is a profound meditation on how animals affect our sense of self, our memories, our actions.

This brilliant new book of non-fiction investigates – with the insights and perceptions of some of the finest writers at work today – how animals shape and determine our everyday lives, whether we realise it or not.

‘Spirited and intense, compact as poetry, Running feet, sharp noses reads like a classic.’
– Martina Evans, Irish Times

‘Running feet, sharp noses unveils a collection of chambers, with each writer’s cosmos featuring the animals in their lives; “a source of magic”.’
– Aisling Arundel, Totally Dublin

‘Sensitive, playful, and every bit as charming as its subjects, Running feet, sharp noses is a modern bestiary, a fitting tribute to the fragile and dear connections we forge with animals, and their ability to capture the literary imagination.’
– Roisin Kiberd, author of The Disconnect

‘A joy.’
– Irish Independent

‘Extraordinary … Animal lovers, or indeed lovers of great, philosophical writing, will adore this book which invites repeated readings and reflections.’
–Andrea Cleary, Business Post

‘A treasure … exquisite … A beautiful anthology.’
– Anne Cunningham, Westmeath Examiner

‘These unique non-fiction stories deserve to be on your reading list in 2023.’
– ‘Hot 100’, Irish Examiner

Listed in: ‘The best new fiction and non-fiction coming your way from January to June.’
– Anne Cunningham, Irish Independent

With contributions by Latifa Akay, Sara Baume, John Berger, June Caldwell, Niamh Campbell, Vona Groarke, Edward Hoagland, Sabrina Mandanici, Darragh McCausland, Tim MacGabhann, Honor Moore, Eileen Myles, Stephen Sexton, Jessica Traynor, Erica Van Horn, and Suzanne Walsh.

Publication date: March 2023
Publicity: peteroconnellmedia@gmail.com
EXTS: 11 × 17.5 cm, 176 pp, 1 b/w ill., softcover
ISBN: 978-1-9161509-4-2
Design: Daly & Lyon

To inhabit a home means to leave traces; it is a place of self-expression, a place of one’s own. We collect and display what we choose: a print, a chipped figurine, a collection of spoons or plates, photographs, books, a rug, a painting whose origin is forgotten, an unmade bed …

well I just kind of like it, edited by Wendy Erskine, comprises a collection of writing and images about art in the home and the home as art. Through a beautifully arranged series of essays, conversations, photographs, fragments, drawings, and reflections, each contributor sheds light on the stuff of the home in a vital and compelling way.

‘A powerful look at a wide and idiosyncratic range of work … There’s a sense, throughout, of things that had been peripheral coming into focus.’
– Niamh Donnelly, Irish Times

‘Undoubtedly a vibrant tapestry of work. Erskine masterfully concocts a visual feast.’
– Aisling Arundel, Totally Dublin

‘This collection lends credence to our own personal tastes, and to our human impulse as curators and creators of art.’
– Andrea Cleary, Sunday Business Post

With contributions by Latifa Akay, Mauricio Alejo, Richard Billingham, Jo Broughton, Darran Anderson, Rossa Coyle, Emily Dickinson, Susannah Dickey, Wendy Erskine, Nicole Flattery, David Hayden, David Keenan, Heather Leigh, Philip Mann, Jan McCullough, Gareth McConnell, Lara Pawson, Keith Ridgway, Joseph Scott, Frances Stark, Annelies Štrba, Maurice van Tellingen, Joanna Walsh, and Shaun Whiteside.

Border thinking has become a defining feature of the global social order in the twenty-first century. In Being a Border, art historian, critic, and theorist Nuit Banai writes on the technics of the border in contemporary art and culture.

Edited by Francis Halsall and Declan Long, Being a Border examines a wide span of artists’ practices and political concerns, exploring how border thinking has been cultivated and engineered as well as how it has been critiqued. Looking at a range of art practices – including Richard Mosse, the Centre for Political Beauty, Vedovamazzei, and Grada Kilomba – Banai considers how artists have found ways to subvert these increasingly pervasive biopolitical and necropolitical technologies and systems.

The first in a new book-series, Transmission Sites, Being a Border is a co-publication by Paper Visual Art and the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. This book was written following Nuit Banai’s participation in the Art in the Contemporary World (ACW) / IMMA Visiting Critic-in-Residence programme in 2014.

Transmission Sites is a cross-disciplinary book series, featuring extended critical texts on current concerns by key theorists or writers. Each book is devised and co-published with a partner educational or cultural institution.

Design: an Atelier Project
10.5 × 15 cm, 52 pages, 8 colour ills, softcover
ISBN 978-1-9161509-2-8

You & i are Earth brings together texts by a wide range of Irish and international writers, all of whom share painting as a starting point. These texts take several forms: artists’ writing, personal essays, analytical and critical accounts of paintings that range from Renaissance masterpieces to the work of contemporary avant-garde artists.

Taking its title from the enigmatic inscription on a seventeenth-century Dutch-made plate, discovered in a London sewer, You & i are Earth follows a set of poetic associative patterns that derive from Feehily’s artistic practice, exploring serendipitous connections and recovered histories, attending thoughtfully and with care to what might seem incidental. Like the inscription on the found object, paintings contain moments, feelings, obsessions – traces of life preserved in layers of pigment. In the artist’s words, ‘This is a daybook, a commonplace, an anthology of shared attention.’

Contributions by Annie May Demozay, Fergus Feehily, John Graham, Jack Hanley, Mary Heilmann, Naotaka Hiro, Rebecca O’Dwyer, Paul P., Eleanor Ray, Luis Sagasti, Carole Seborovski, Mark Swords, Stephen Truax, and Joost van den Bergh

Accepted into the 100 Archive (2020).

March 2021
Design: an Atelier Project
Kindly supported by the Arts Council
12 × 18.9 cm, 112 pages, 8 b/w and 14 colour ills., softcover
ISBN 978–1–9161509–1–1

The things and processes we often categorise as ‘infrastructure’ occupy a zone beyond the limits of our cognition; and yet this zone is buried in our everyday lives. Infrastructures operate below the average thresholds of human awareness while subliminally dictating the permissible flows of the everyday. To engage creatively with them is to go back to first principles. To think critically about them is to think about the ways in which realities are sculpted, about politics and power.

Everything Is Somewhere Else, edited by Dennis McNulty, presents an innovative cross-section of the infrastructural turn in contemporary art and comprises a heterogeneous mix of texts, both fiction and non-fiction, documentary materials, and images. Each contribution reflects directly or indirectly on infrastructure, on the interwoven mesh of systems that inhabit our lives, affect our thoughts and beliefs, and play a key role in how we live and move in the contemporary world.

“… meticulously edited …”
– Ingrid Lyons, Visual Artist News Sheet, Jan/Feb 2021

Contributions by Maeve Connolly, Matthew De Abaitua, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Jessica Foley, Gabriel N. Gee, Cliona Harmey, Nancy Holt, Shannon Mattern, Eva Richardson McCrea, Dennis McNulty, Jennifer Reut, Matt Packer, Charlotte Prodger, Anne Tallentire, Dan Walwin

June 2020
Design: Peter Maybury
Kindly supported by the Arts Council
96 pages, 24 colour ills., softcover, fold-out
ISBN 978-1-916150-90-4

In the Centre Gallery of Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, County Cork, lay, until recently, behind layers of liner paper and white emulsion, a very well-kept secret: a nine-part series of floor-to-ceiling paintings by the New York–based Irish artist Brian O’Doherty, created under his pseudonym Patrick Ireland. The brightly coloured abstract wall paintings, titled One Here Now: The Ogham Cycle, were completed in 1996 using the system of codes and inherent structures of the ogham language, an early Irish alphabet. After their initial display, the paintings were covered over. For the next twenty-two years they went unseen.

In 2018 Sirius Arts Centre Director Miranda Driscoll organised an ambitious project to uncover and temporarily restore the paintings, with the expertise of the conservator Don Knox. To coincide with this restoration, she also commissioned a year-long programme of artworks, compositions, performances, and talks that would respond to O’Doherty/Ireland’s work. One Here Now: The Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland Project, co-published by Sirius Arts Centre and Paper Visual Art, comprises essays on O’Doherty’s wall murals and on each of the exhibitions and events that took place at Sirius Arts Centre from 2018 to 2019. The contributions in this book re-examine and re-interrogate the wall paintings and reflect on a project intended to preserve the legacy of these important artworks for future generations.

Contributions by Alexander Alberro, Chris Clarke, Miranda Driscoll, Emma Dwyer, Luke Gibbons, Francis Halsall, Sarah Hayden, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Sarah Kelleher, Prem Krishnamurthy, Eoghan MacIntyre, Ian Maleney, Brenda Moore-McCann, Peter Murray, Kirstie North, Brian O’Doherty, Nathan O’Donnell, Jenny Roche, and Mary-Ruth Walsh.

The book was launched at Sirius Arts Centre by Frances Morris, Director of Tate Modern, in April 2019.

April 2019
Design: Daly + Lyon
Kindly supported by the Arts Council
25 cm × 30 cm, 194 pages, 24 colour ills., softcover

Having a Kiki: Queer Desire and Public Space, edited by artist Emma Haugh, presents an unprecedented examination of public space and the built environment through queer, dyke, and transgender perspectives.

‘Given the interdisciplinary nature of Having a Kiki, its appeal will surely be as broad as encompassing as the experiences relayed within it.’
– Stephen Moloney, Totally Dublin, February 2017

Contributions by Oreet Ashery, Claude Cahun, Faye Green, Emma Haugh and Suza Husse, Frankie Hucklenbroich, Libida Club Archive, Sally R. Munt, Kaj Osteroth and Lydia Hamann, Sideroom (Amal Alhaag and Maria Guggenbichler), Neo Sinoxolo Musangi, and Eimear Walshe.

Awarded the ICAD Silver Bell award for design.
Accepted into the 100 Archive (2016).

October 2016
Design: Atelier Projects
Kindly supported by the Arts Council
17 cm × 24 cm, 96 pages, 24 colour ills., softcover, 2 inserts
ISBN 978-0-957335-06-6

*Low stock*

Nevsky Prospect, edited by Adrian Duncan and Niamh Dunphy, considers the ‘sci-fi turn’ in contemporary art practice through essays, fiction, and images.

Contributions by Nina Canell, Adrian Duncan, Hu Fang, Francis Halsall, Declan Long, Dennis McNulty, Brenna Murphy, Isabel Nolan, and David Upton

October 2015
Design: Peter Maybury
Kindly supported by the Arts Council
16 cm x 23 cm, 72 pages
ISBN 978-0-9573350-4-2