Since the end of the most recent recession in Ireland, a number of practitioners have emerged in the arts who have given over their practices to issues of land and housing. Feargal Ward’s 2017 feature-length documentary The Lonely Battle of Thomas Reid looked at the impact of a compulsory purchase order (CPO) on a farmer – Reid – in Kildare, who, under considerable legal pressure, instead of selling his farm and moving on, decided to take the affair all the way to the Supreme Court where he won his case, holding off the CPO and retaining his land, farm, and home. Another artist, Mocksim (Micheál O’Connell), has engaged with everyday systems and infrastructures over the past twenty years, through playful interventions in film, sculpture, and collage, most recently drawing attention to the absurdity of the real-estate market. One memorable work, Impromptu exhibition report 05 (2019), a video I came across online, presented the window of a real-estate office in a small town in rural Ireland as if it were a gallery installation of images of landscape with descriptions of the ‘works’/houses-for-sale alongside. The voice-over guided us through this arrangement of domestic dwellings and their pithy descriptors in the register of a curator speaking about a landscape exhibition in an august institution. The absurdity in his work seems to me at times the only reasonable approach to this world of real-estate patter and the faceless financialisation of dwelling. In more urban settings, Avril Corroon has made a series of artworks and exhibitions that focus on the seemingly mundane yet ubiquitous (and toxic) living conditions that have become standard in rental accommodation. Her 2023 exhibition at Project Arts Centre, GOT DAMP / PÚSCADH ANUAS, presented an aluminium stud wall and Perspex-sheeting arrangement enclosing a series of plastic containers, each one filled with water collected from humidifiers Corroon distributed to people living in damp conditions in precarious rental housing in London and Dublin. This extracted water, a source of discomfort and in some cases danger to inhabitants, was presented as a material indicator of the quiet erosion of dignity and bodily autonomy within a financialised housing system.
Eimear Walshe, ROMANTIC IRELAND, installation view, Irish Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2024. Photo: Simon Mills.
Eimear Walshe’s work over the last decade or so has taken up, with variety and force, related questions of land ownership, landscape, and dwelling. Their work has appeared as film, video, sculpture, publications, and public interventions. Walshe’s 2020 single-channel video work for EVA International, The Land Question: Where the fuck am I supposed to have sex?, brought the viewer through a history of the land laws of Ireland from the perspective of someone trying to have public sex comfortably in Ireland. It is a remarkable work, constantly throwing into view the tensions between post-colonial land laws and an individual acting in good faith within or even around them. (This was the first of three phased works by Walshe for the Covid-affected biennial.) Another recent work was a publication commissioned by the National Sculpture Factory in Cork, the land for the people, a beautifully realised workbook containing nineteen ‘exercises’. Each exercise placed the reader in a historic situation and asked them, on the blank page opposite, to respond. For example, exercise five: You are a newlywed seasonal migrant labourer from rural Antrim. Debt is not available to you, so you build your house room-by-room each year when you return from Scotland with seasonal wages. Draw the layout of your home built over five yearly phases. The exercise continues with a scenario wherein this labourer’s landlord is murdered, while attempting a forced eviction, and bonfires are lit across the parish in celebration. The final instruction in the exercise: Mark in red below the position of the bonfire outside your house. What’s so bracing about this book is that it presents a reality where seemingly hopeless situations are turned around and strategies of resistance are put forward. It is a subverting of the poor-mouth narrative that also drags it kicking and screaming into the present.
Eimear Walshe, ROMANTIC IRELAND, photographed 2023. Production still. Photo © Faolán Carey. Courtesy Eimear Walshe and Ireland at Venice.
The tone and politics of this publication are developed in Walshe’s 2024 work for the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Romantic Ireland comprises a sculptural installation taking up the centre of the last bay in the Arsenale building. On the middle wall of a series of mid-height rammed-earth walls protrude three two-way facing screens showing footage of a collection of masked folk engaged in an at-times frenzied theatre in and around another rammed-earth structure in the Irish landscape – one mirroring the structure in the space. The walls look like the beginnings of either two separate single-room abodes in the style of the typical nineteenth-century cottage, or the layout of a semi-detached ‘starter home’ of the kind built in great numbers during the Celtic Tiger. The hearth of these houses is replaced here by these flatscreen TVs, on which play scenes filmed in the diffracted register more associated with the smartphone. The cast of figures in the film wear green latex masks and are all barefoot as they embark on the building (or perhaps dismantling) of this rammed-earth structure in a field. The only defining markers differentiating these figures are their clothes, which range from those of a nineteenth-century peasant to a contemporary farmer (loosely based on Reid of Ward’s film) to a quantity surveyor, an IDA businessman, a judge – all roles tied up in the system of land law, land sales, and dwelling rights. This might suggest structures of hierarchy, except the roles are constantly being undercut, producing a form of seeming chaos that, after a few viewings of the fourteen-minute loop, begins to come together into a fascinating language of its own. Over all of this plays a moving five-voice opera (written by Walshe in collaboration with the composer Amanda Feery), which describes an eviction, peppered with quotes from the infamous 1943 Saint Patrick’s Day speech – ‘The Ireland that we dreamed of’ – where Éamon De Valera spelled out the aims of the new nation. It is the sort of speech that today would seem at once impossibly socialist and theocratic.
Eimear Walshe, ROMANTIC IRELAND, photographed 2023. Production still. Photo © Faolán Carey. Courtesy Eimear Walshe and Ireland at Venice.
As the film work progresses, a series of uneasy alliances appear between the characters, an unease that becomes heightened when the film style begins to collapse in upon itself. One shot, for example, shows a phone, filming a phone, filming a figure filming in return. The longer you watch, the clearer it is that what is being conveyed here is a sense of overriding psychosis that dismantles any chance of traditional alliances taking shape between these figures. At one moment the lanyarded quantity surveyor is dragged from the house and assaulted by the other figures in a reenactment of a meitheal turned violent. Then, moments later, this surveyor is high-fiving a peasant. The whole work at once acknowledges and turns linear narrative on its head and by doing so suggests the contemporary house as a platform for the staging of competing and at times incompatible desires that range in scale from the economic to the legal to the religious to the marital to the physiological.
At one point, a child of clay appears, cradled by one person while its eyes are poked into existence by another. Here the operatic (almost ecclesiastical) lines from earlier in the film loop begin to resonate:
The house, the house, the house
Has sown its seed in me
And soon when I am dust
Another hand will come
And make me into blocks
And build their home of me…
This lyric, in tandem with the image of the clay child produces a strange sense of intimacy that extends further when you realise Walshe seems to be bringing your attention to the word ‘shelter’ not only as suggested in the idea of ‘home’ but also in the type of shelter given by a ‘national narrative’ – an Ireland that can be (as de Valera put it) a haven, aiming to provide basic provision and dignity for its citizens. The experience of navigating this work can feel at times like decoding an allegorical painting in motion, but when the resonances between voice/text/image/action land, they land hard and with surprising and energising precision.
There are other times when one takes a step back and begins to circumnavigate this whole arrangement of operatic voice, soil, and screens and it starts to appear, less a site to present a filmic work than a formal, living sculpture, one that at once reveals and closes its nature from view. This brings a sense of propulsion to the work that is, I think appropriately, more spatial than filmic. And in this new sense of space, a different set of social structures begins to appear, taking the form of what seemed to me to be a finite if roofless piece of living territory being fervently contested by a group of people – inhabitants, citizens – of fluxing affiliation.
Adrian Duncan is an Irish artist and writer.
This review first appeared in the hardcopy edition PVA 16, published November 2024.
