Ciarán Walsh developed the Rushes | Luachair project in collaboration with artist Laura Fitzgerald, researchers Sarah Arnold and Carolann Madden at Maynooth University, the monument care team at OPW andCara Trant at Kerry Writers’ Museum, with funding from the Heritage Council and specialist support from Kerry College and Limerick School of art and Design.
Lorraine Neeson’s short film Raven screened on Listowel Castle during the Rushes | Luachair workshop [link]
Timed for Imbolc|Féile Bríde 2026, the project celebrated women’s moving image art practice and cast a critical eye on the curatorial and archival needs of women artists/filmmakers. As the project evolved it became a celebration of analogue art and film, catching a zeitgeist that responds to the rise of deep fakes on digital platforms; the grain of cathode ray screens and the clickety clack of a Kodak Carousel slide projector automated by a C48 audio cassette tape captivated the artists and their audience alike, as did a tech-free 1600’s style camera obscura.
Michael Mulcahy (right) guides Carolann Madden, Sarah Arnold, Rena Blake, Lorraine Neeson and Lisa Fingleton through the working of a Bolex 16mm camera during Heritage Week 2024.
This project was not about nostalgia for vintage tech however. The inspiration came from two community event held during Heritage Week 2024. The first a community cinema screening of work by Laura Fitzgerald and Lisa Fingleton at the Barna Way eco-social arts project and organic farm near Ballybunion. This event was designed to move the film and video archival project at Kerry Writers’ Museum out of the past and engage with contemporary practice. The second was an 8mm and 16mm film workshop that veteran filmmaker Michael Mulcahy led with Sarah Arnold and Carolann Madden of Maynooth University School of Media Studies. Both events revealed an unexpected level of interest in analogue filmmaking among artists as much as a generational skills gap.
In response, Walsh and Fitzgerald decided to showcase new work in Kerry and so demonstrate that independent community filmmaking is still going strong in rushy places in rural Ireland. The Heritage Council agreed to fund a second year of the project and Walsh asked to Fitzgerald to curate an exhibition. She asked Lisa Fingleton, Bláithín Mac Donnell, Lorraine Neeson, and Mieke Vanmechelen to join the project and we settled on Rushes | Luachair as a working title, which plays with an association between “rushes” as shorthand for marginal and marshy land and “rushes” as a legacy term for a first glance at film footage shot.
Fitzgerald took the exhibition out of the confines of a small, improvised gallery space and insinuated it – as in “wove” it like a rushy Bridget’s cross – into the standing, twenty five year old exhibition dedicated to five male writers from North Kerry. It sounds antagonistic, but Fitzgerald’s curation of cutting-edge contemporary work showed an extraordinary sensitivity to the reality of a heritage site and generated interesting synergies that enhanced both.
Blaithín Mac Donnell performs “The Road Cuts Through” at the opening of Rushes | Luachair.
Fitzgerald, Bláithín Mac Donnell and Lorraine Neeson adapted existing work and devised new installations and performances in response to the museum. Fingleton chose Listowel Castle as a screen for her film LoveLochán. Neeson and Limerick School of Art and Design provided tech support, which was badly needed given the amount of analogue gear that was used in the show. Mulcahy and Paul Dolan played cameo as TV repairmen. Kerry County library donated a Kodak Carousel display unit that be came an instant hit. The monuments care team of OPW turned Listowel Castle into a community cinema that literally stopped townspeople in their tracks as they made their way to mass on Saturday evening.
Sarah Arnold and Carolann Madden led a day long workshop on archives that is part of a longer research project that addesses the invisibility of women filmmakers in archives that constitute organised heritage.
The Workshop
Sarah Arnold and Carolann Madden work together on projects engaged with amateur filmmaking and the development of metadata schemas and archival practices that foregrounds women’s contribution to amateur filmmaking. They led a filmmaking workshop – Super 8 and 16mm – at Kerry Writers’ Museum during Heritage Week 2024, where they met Lisa Fingleton, Laura Fitzgerald and Lorraine Neeson. That sparked the idea of an event that became the Rushes | Luachair project.
Given the Imbolc | Féile Bríde timing/framing, the workshop is modelled on a traditional meitheal of women filmmakers and will be a hands-on exploration of the work in the exhibition, community filmmaking and the management of analogue and digital media heritage assets – old, new and liminal.
As such, the symposium constitutes the terminus for a two-year R&D journey at Kerry Writers’ Museum, which the Heritage Council funded. That journey will continue. The conversations that happen during the meitheal | workshop will be summarised in a manifesto inspired by and engaged with the work on show.
In a nod to old fashioned modernism, the Rushes | Luachair manifesto will rally practitioners and researchers active in the rapidly growing field of legacy media practice, community filmmaking and analogue/digital assets management in the arts and heritage sectors.
This event is supported by Research Ireland and the New Foundations scheme under grant number NF/2024/11760.
Tony Fitzmaurice, c. 1960, Killocrim Wrenboys perform in Listowel.
Tony Fitzmaurice photographed Wrenboys from various townlands in north Kerry performing in Listowel in 1960. Inspired by this I filmed two ‘Wrens’ on St Stephen’s Day 2025; the Ballybunion and Ballydonoghue Wren performing at Lisselton Cross and Dreoilín na Ríochta, Teach Siamsa Finuge moving from house to house in Killocrim, home to one of the groups Fitzmaurice photographed in 1960. The sound track features Seán Ahern as lead vocal on Aililiú an Dreoilín (Ah! The Wren), accompanied by the Siamsa Tíre performance company on a recording made in 1976. Frances Kennedy sings The Boys of Barr na Sráide (who hunted for the Wran). Both groups play a range of traditional and seasonal tunes, captured in passing on a shotgun mic.
An Dreoilín | The Wren 2025 is part of a larger work in progress about the extraordinary – but little known – Irish photographer Tony Fitzmaurice (1932-2019). The sight of a Strawboy walking down the road in Killocrim reminded me of a sketch in the Haddon Papers in Cambridge University Library. That sparked another idea which I develop in my Ballymaclinton Blog.
A race against time
Tony Fitzmaurice (1932-2019) of Ballybunion built an extraordinary collection of social documentary photographs over six decades, starting in 1954 when his parents gave him a present of a Kodak Retinette camera in recognition of his growing interest in photography. “Tony always had a camera at hand” wrote his cousin Kathy Reynolds on the website TONY’S PHOTO ARCHIVE, which she developed after Fitzmaurice’s widow Madeline asked her to “take the collection and decide what should be done with it”.
Tony Fitzmaurice c. 1960. Detail of a digital scan of an original contact sheet, which Fitzmaurice created in a darkroom by laying negatives on an 8X10 inch sheet of photographic paper and exposing them to light before developing the sheet as a positive photograph. Each image is numbered.
Kathy recalls how, as a child, she was fascinated by the dark-room her father’s first cousin built at the back of the kitchen and she attributes her interest in photography to him. Kathy and husband Steve – also a photographer – expected a lot of amateur landscape photography when they began going through the collection in 2019 and were astonished by the thousands of negatives that document social life in North Kerry. “Of particular interest” Kathy wrote “are the early photographs from the 1950’s and 1960’s that capture so well the town of Ballybunion along with the events and people of North Kerry”.
The most striking aspect of Fitzmaurice’s collection is that he was, in practice, photographer in residence in Ballybunion for almost six decades: the first three were taken up with black and white photography mainly, with a secondary line in colour slides that continued into the 2000s. After he retired from business in 2,000, Fitzmaurice began documenting the villages and holy wells of North Kerry. Indeed, Fitzmaurice recorded the changing backdrop of Ballybunion and its hinterland from the black and white fifties and sixties to the ‘Kodachrome’ Celtic Tiger. This collection within a collection featured in Kerry County Council’s festival Architecture Kerry 2025 – Bringing Life To Spaces.
Fitzmaurice was first and foremost a social documentary photographer but, unlike the wider movement in photography, he was an insider and his early work provides a unique perspective on rural Ireland in transition from the fifties to the sixties. It is a view that is characterised by familiarity, continuity and a startling directness of vision. The collection is, in essence, an intimate portrait of a community made up of 26,000 photographs shot over six decades; Fitzmaurice shot many of the early photos in local ballrooms where Fitzmaurice operated as “Tony – Photographer, Ballybunion“. This part of the collection constitutes an extraordinary collective portrait that challenges many of the stereotypical images of rural Ireland in the 1950s and 60s. It is also the part of the collection that is in need of urgent conservation.
Tony Fitzmaurice, 1953, Ballybunion People # 33.
Fitzmaurice kept the negatives from each roll of film – six strips of six photographs per film usually – in folded manila envelopes that he packed tightly into six drawers of a small wooden cabinet. By the time of his death – sixty years after he began taking B&W photos – this had created two problems. The first is vinegar syndrome, a progressive and irreversible deterioration of the plastic film strip that releases acetic acid – hence the telltale vinegar smell. The second is a microbial growth that releases enzymes that consume the organic gelatine binder of the photographic layer. It is a lethal combination that has destroyed one third of the negatives and severely damaged another third.
Kathy and Steve began unpacking the collection in 2020 and had digitised almost six thousand images by 2025. They started with the most damaged images – the colour slides – and moved on to photographs that Fitzmaurice took at various dances and events. Their plan was place as many images as possible in the public domain and identify the people in them by creating website TONY’S PHOTO ARCHIVE as an online portal. They turned their attention to the long term future of the collection and looked for a home in or around Ballybunion. Kathy came across my work during Heritage Week 2024 and I met them in the Photographers’ Gallery in London in March 2025. They were looking to place the collective in a publicly accessible and not-for-profit archive. They donated the collection to Kerry Writers’ Museum in May 2025.
Preliminary conservation work revealed the extent of damage concealed in drawers that had not yet been scanned. The relentless progress of vinegar syndrome can be seen in the deterioration in negatives Kathy and Steve scanned three years before (see below). However, even the most damaged strips contain striking images that can be scanned and our priority now is to save these images. It’s a race against time.
&
Tony Fitzmaurice, 1953, Ballybunion People © Kerry Writers’ Museum
Kerry Writers’ Museum marks International Museum Day on Sunday 18 May with a public event celebrating the acquisition of three very important collections.
A major Heritage Council award has made it possible for the museum to acquire Jimmy Deenihan’s remarkable library of North Kerry Literary Trust video recordings of Kerry writers and their associates. Kathy Reynold has gifted Tony Fitzmaurice’s collection of over 26,000 world class social documentary photographs shot in and around Ballybunion in from 1954 on wards. Leo Finucane will gift a collection of material created over an extraordinary career as a filmmaker based in Moyvane.
Kerry Writers’ Museum received €47,750 from the Heritage Council to continue recovering and archiving films shot in rural north Kerry. This funding will enable the museum to develop a viewing library with trained staff to provide free, public access to these and other collections as they are archived and digitised. That places Kerry Writers’ Museum at the forefront of a strategic drive to manage public engagement with archives like this at a local level.
