Rushes | Luachair – celebrating women’s moving image art practice
Charlie Broderick, Paul Moynihan, Jim Counihan and Mike Moynihan of the OPW with Rushes | Luachair curator Laura Fitzgerald and artist Chris Steenson.
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 and Cara 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 used this as a platform to 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.
This project was not about nostalgia for vintage tech however. The inspiration came from two events held during Heritage Week 2024. The first was 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 well as a generational skills gap.
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.
The Heritage Council agreed to fund a second year of the archives project and Fitzgerald agreed to curate an exhibition that demonstrated that independent community filmmaking is still going strong in rushy places in rural Ireland. 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 at Kerry Writers’ Museum space and insinuated it – as in “wove” it like a rushy Bridget’s cross – into the permanent, 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.
Rushes|Luachair curator and artist nLaura Fitzgerald installing her work in the Maurice Walsh room at Kerry Writers’ Museum.
Blaithín Mac Donnell performs “The Road Cuts Through” at the opening of Rushes | Luachair.
Fitzgerald, Mac Donnell and Neeson adapted existing work and devised new installations and performances in response to the various spaces and exhibits in the museum. Fingleton chose Listowel Castle – next door to the museum – 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 roles as TV repairmen. Kerry County library donated the 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 and from 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 was 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.
Research Ireland and the New Foundations scheme supported this project under grant number NF/2024/11760.
L-R Ciarán Walsh, Lorraine Neeson, Lisa Fingleton, Bláithín Mac Donnell, Mieke Vanmechelen, Shane Batten and Laura Fitzgerald.