Projects
IARSMAÍ | the “stolen” skulls of Inishbofin and other stories | TG4 9/10 @ 21:30
9/10/2024 @ 21:30 Iarsmaí features the closing stages of a long campaign to persuade the School of Medicine in Trinity College Dublin (TCD) to return for burial the remains of thirteen individuals stolen from the island in 1890. Marie Coyne...
Heritage Week 2024
Kerry Writers' Museum contributes to Heritage Week 2024 with an exciting programme of workshops, screenings and talks that explore the heritage value of film and digital media used to generate personal and community memories and networks. Daily...
Kerry Writers’ Museum
Kerry Writers' Museum has received significant Heritage Council funding for r&d on the management of film, digital media and intangible heritage assets at a community level. A key part of this task will be developing a collection management...
What is it like to be inside a Camera?
Kerry Writers' Museum has constructed a camera obscura so that people can experience what it is like to be inside a camera. Curators drilled a hole in a shutter on a window overlooking the square in Listowel and an image of St. John's Theatre and...
The Bolex Boys
’The Bolex Boys’ exhibition takes its name from the famous 16mm camera and profiles the work of independent filmmakers John Lynch & Michael Mulcahy. They created an extraordinary cinematic record of the changing social and cultural landscape of...
The Haddon Dixon Repatriation Project
In 2020, TCD announced plans to deal with its colonial legacy and we asked Provost Paddy Prendergast if he had heard of the stolen skulls held in TCD. The repatriation of these remains would, we proposed, be a good way to start decolonising the...
Returning Home: the photographs of Charles R. Browne
Inishbofin Heritage Museum presents 'Returning Home’, an outdoor exhibition of photographs taken in Inishbofin 1893. The aim is to add living faces to the anthropological collection of human remains that Trinity College, University of Dublin...
The Photography of John Millington Synge
In 2007, Ciarán Walsh discovered an album of John Millington Synge’s photographs that Lilo Stephen’s published on the centenary of his death in 1971. He tracked the original negatives to TCD, and Felicity O’Mahony in the Manuscript Library arranged...
Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savage
Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savage is also a book about photography and it pivots on Haddon’s discovery of ‘instantaneous’ or social documentary photography in the Aran Islands in 1890. I argue that this led to an experiment in...
Haddon and the Aran Islands: An Exhibition at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London
‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ opens in the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) on 15 October 2023. The exhibition features twenty five photographs that are organised around a slideshow Haddon presented in 1890 and titled ‘The Aran Islands’. It...
Inishbofin burial: the most import anthropological event in Ireland since 1930s?
The opening of a grave in a community burial ground marks the end of a ten-year campaign seeking the return and burial of the ‘stolen skulls’ of Inishbofin. Community representatives will remove the remains of their ancestors from the ‘Old‘ Anatomy...
EYEBALL publishing
John Millington Synge | Photographer
An installation shot of the exhibition of photographs by John Millington Synge in Knitwear Inis Meáin, the Aran Islands in 2009. Photo: Ciarán Walsh. Synge's photographs were first exhibited on Inis Meáin – the island most associated with Synge –...
Fairscine Inise | An Island Portrait
Gearóid Cheaist Ó Catháin, the last child to live on the Great Blasket Island, with Dáithí de Mórdha, The Great Blasket Centre, in front of a photograph of Gearóid with his Grandfather Maurice Mhuiris Ó Catháin, taken by Dan...
Folk
Folk is an oral history of the folk theatre movement that developed in County Kerry in the 1960s and thrived for over three decades.This project has been developed in partnership with Pat Ahern, the leader of that movement. I have recorded a long...
Public History | Journalism
LINKS Walsh. 2020. "The head-hunter who measured Irishmen's skulls," selected for broadcast as podcast (link). Walsh. 2020.“The Victorian Curator who Railed against Racism and Imperialism.” The Irish Independent Review, June 20, 2020, p. 10 (link)....
Donegal County Archives Service
Donegal County Council Archives Service acquired a collection of photographs by Ann Doherty in 2018. Doherty worked as a photojournalist with the Sunday Times Magazine between 1994 and 2005 and documented ordinary people living in extraordinary...
The Skull Measuring Business
The Skull Measuring Business (2015 – 2020) A miscellany of murderous little facts from the hidden spaces of anthropology in Ireland: Some Background Ciarán Walsh set up curator.ie in 2010 following the international success of his exhibition...