Programme Leader, MA Design History and Material Culture, NCAD. Specialist in the history of architecture, design and material culture, Irish studies and research methodologies.
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Jun 1, 2012
Open House Dublin . Irish Architecture Foundation. 7–9 October 2011 Henrietta Street, 8 October 2... more Open House Dublin . Irish Architecture Foundation. 7–9 October 2011 Henrietta Street, 8 October 2011. We are in theatrical surroundings: a short, sloped cul-de-sac in an unloved part of Dublin’s northern inner city, lined with thirteen enormous, stark Georgian houses of which a few have been restored, while the others are intact but tottering. There is a crowd of people, nervous and excited as befits the drama of the place, and jostling to be among the first to have access to number 10. Probably built in the late 1720s, this was the townhouse of Luke Gardiner, the developer who created some of the most important urban set pieces of Dublin, including this one, the city’s grandest residential street from the early eighteenth century (Figure 1). Groups of ten at a time are admitted for tours all afternoon, and are lucky to be guided by an architect who knows the much-remodeled house intimately and is from the firm that recently carried out conservation and restoration work on it. Now a Catholic convent, on any other day of the year 10 Henrietta Street is only accessible to its resident nuns and their guests. But this is Open House weekend, when buildings all over the city and suburbs of Dublin can be visited by anyone interested in architecture, and, in many cases, willing to wait in line. This year’s program involves 130 events including building visits, walking tours, exhibitions and symposia. Figure 1 10 Henrietta Street, 1720s, Dublin (Irish Architecture Foundation) The first Open House was held in London almost twenty years ago, and the idea has spread around the world. While the Open House Worldwide network has twelve official members including Open House Tel Aviv, openhousenewyork and Open House Melbourne; related events include “Doors Open” weekends in many American cities. Dublin’s Open House is distinctive in being directed by an organization with a specific …
Snapshot stories: visuality, photography, and the social history of Ireland, 1922–2000. By Erika Hanna. Pp 288. Oxford University Press. 2020. £60 hardback
Bodily-Material Culture Techniques in the Spaces of the Devotional Revolution
Journal of Victorian Culture, Mar 31, 2023
This essay addresses how new procedural knowledge was promoted during the devotional revolution i... more This essay addresses how new procedural knowledge was promoted during the devotional revolution in nineteenth-century Ireland, particularly in relation to bodily-material culture techniques. It argues that a more orthopraxic physical disposition was a significant aspect of the experience and practice of Catholicism, and suggests ways of thinking about that in relation to religious imagination and space. In this, it sees bodies as connected to artefacts through material practices. The bodily-material culture techniques under discussion include gesture, ways of interacting with objects and spaces, and in general the embedding of new forms of material knowledge and body schema. In this, this essay re-examines the relationship between religious and secular space during this period. On the one hand, at this time the intense construction and prominent siting of thousands of religious buildings including churches, denominational institutions and entire urban quarters suggest that sacred and secular spaces were highly defined and circumscribed. However, a focus on bodies and objects also suggests the idea of immanence, and a more fluid inter-relationship between sacred and profane space than might be generally considered. The contribution draws largely on regulatory and instructive literature including catechisms and popular devotional tracts, personal testimony and specific liturgical and devotional objects and spaces.
3 5 D es ig n an d C ul tu re Indeed his seemingly melting black couch from 1964 is one of the ex... more 3 5 D es ig n an d C ul tu re Indeed his seemingly melting black couch from 1964 is one of the exhibition’s highlights. (On loan from Aagaard Andersen’s children, it, like many of the exhibition’s objects, is rarely available to the public.) It is made from urethane, a synthetic powder that, when mixed with a foaming agent – usually a combination of Freon and water – expands into a resilient mass and acquires a tough skin. This is the couch Aagaard Andersen lived with, its smooth black surface now decaying from use. But though the skin is breaking down, it nevertheless makes clear Aagaard Andersen’s break with existing design technique and style. In contrast to more traditional Danish design, made of wood crafted by cabinetmakers, Aagaard Andersen crafted his chair from a ‘spurious’ material that gave off deadly fumes, but that permitted him to fabricate a design entirely of one substance and without any mechanical joints. The couch shown in company with Ord (1964–65), Aagaard Andersen’s sculptural polyurethane wall hanging that, like a three-dimensional Ed Ruscha, spells out “ord,” Danish for “word.” The juxtaposition makes clear that both blur the lines between design and sculpture. The exhibition is most interesting when it draws out these relationships between Aagaard Andersen’s work across medium. The curators would have done well to highlight more of these relationships, especially alongside more in-depth explanations of the historical context. A simple, almost puritanical exhibition with few wall texts and little photographic documentation, it seemed at times too stylish, focused on design as art instead of design in use. Curator Vibeke Petersen’s forthcoming publication on Aagaard Andersen will, hopefully, correct this, providing the historical context that the exhibition lacked.
For almost thirty years and through a series of more than forty television programmes, David Shaw... more For almost thirty years and through a series of more than forty television programmes, David Shaw-Smith has chronicled Irish craft workers, and in doing so has created an unmatched record of individuals, tech-niques and artefacts. His Hands documentaries for RTE (the Irish ...
Vintage values: Classic pamphlet cover design from twentieth-century ireland
Material Religion, Sep 1, 2014
Just before he died, the Irish writer John McGahern (1934–2006) described the country he grew up ... more Just before he died, the Irish writer John McGahern (1934–2006) described the country he grew up in as “a theocracy in all but name,” where the Catholic Church had “absolute power” (McGahern 2006: 63, 64). The clergy dominated much of Irish life, and from the mid-1920s in particular they were aided and abetted by a number of lay organizations. Few were more powerful than the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland (CTSI). Founded as a branch of the English Catholic Truth Society in 1899, the CTSI are well known for their role in pressing the Irish government to pass censorship legislation, leading to the severe Censorship of Publications Act in 1929. The CTSI’s core aim was the distribution of inexpensive Catholic reading material, a moral bulwark against cheap and “dangerous” publications. They carried out this work with great vigor—from 1925 to the early 1970s, the CTSI distributed more than a million pamphlets every year. In 1969, the organization was reined in to the Catholic Communications Institute of Ireland, their publishing branch becoming “Veritas,” their core activity now the publication of religious textbooks. Owing to their role in Ireland’s draconian censorship regime, to many cultural historians the CTSI epitomize the insular and conservative image of midtwentieth-century Ireland. However, that didn’t prevent them from embracing aspects of cultural modernity, not least in their pamphlet designs. In 1953, Father Peter Birch outlined what was appropriate for the design of such objects: “Pamphlets must be bright, cheerful and topical. We must use modern methods of production, display and salesmanship” (McCormack 2013: 5). The commercial artists who worked on the pamphlets certainly followed that brief. The original artwork was discovered in two filing cabinets by Lir Mac Cárthaigh, the Art Director of Veritas. He was astonished by what he found. Expecting to uncover crude line-art and blurry pious imagery, Mac Cárthaigh was faced with hundreds of vividly colored paragons of commercial art. The punchy titles of the pamphlets were similarly a surprise, but one that chimed with their design, including “Modesty and Modernity,” “Divorce is a Disease,” “Fashionable Sins” (Figure 1), and “What! Me a Saint?” In recognition of their value as material culture, and their potential appeal to designers and illustrators, Mac Cárthaigh set about scanning the pamphlets, his work resulting in an exhibition at the National Print Museum, a publication, a website (http://www.vintagevalues.com/), limited-edition posters, and sets of slickly packaged postcards.
The article argues that the debate around Italian Renaissance disegno has tended to overemphasize... more The article argues that the debate around Italian Renaissance disegno has tended to overemphasize the rhetoric promoting a separation between design and execution, mind and body, and asserting a hierarchy of the arts constructed on the friction between intellectual and corporeal engagement in the making of artefacts. Building on written sources such as so-called "technical treatises" and on objects taken as evidence of the design process, it is suggested that we should consider instead a more integrated, organic, technologically engaged and "mechanical" notion of disegno, in which design might be seen to grow within a physical environment from the interconnection of human action and materials. Using Renaissance pottery as a case study, and exploring its understanding within different linguistic, literary and material contexts, the article proposes an epistemology allowing for greater fluidity, overlap and communality between supposedly distinct arts. The emergenc...
This essay addresses how new procedural knowledge was promoted during the devotional revolution i... more This essay addresses how new procedural knowledge was promoted during the devotional revolution in nineteenth-century Ireland, particularly in relation to bodily-material culture techniques. It argues that a more orthopraxic physical disposition was a significant aspect of the experience and practice of Catholicism, and suggests ways of thinking about that in relation to religious imagination and space. In this, it sees bodies as connected to artefacts through material practices. The bodily-material culture techniques under discussion include gesture, ways of interacting with objects and spaces, and in general the embedding of new forms of material knowledge and body schema. In this, this essay reexamines the relationship between religious and secular space during this period. On the one hand, at this time the intense construction and prominent siting of thousands of religious buildings including churches, denominational institutions and entire urban quarters suggest that sacred and secular spaces were highly defined and circumscribed. However, a focus on bodies and objects also suggests the idea of immanence, and a more fluid interrelationship between sacred and profane space than might be generally considered. The contribution draws largely on regulatory and instructive literature including catechisms and popular devotional tracts, personal testimony and specific liturgical and devotional objects and spaces.
The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Cultures , 2018
Chapter from The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Cultures, edited by Marguérite Corporaal... more Chapter from The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Cultures, edited by Marguérite Corporaal et. al., Liverpool University Press 2018. It examines the visual and material culture of Irish Catholicism in relation to system, affect and display through addressing liturgical objects, religious images and public ritual, mobilising the political theology of Giorgio Agamben.
This article addresses the material culture of Catholicism in Ireland from the late 1830s to the ... more This article addresses the material culture of Catholicism in Ireland from the late 1830s to the mid-1890s through a close examination of the advertisements carried by the Irish Catholic Directory. It explores the origins, dissemination and types of goods advertised over this time period. This is considered in four distinct phases: up to the late 1840s, liturgical equipment formed the bulk of the advertisements; from the late 1840s to the 1860s there was a new focus on devotional objects for the laity; from the 1860s there was an emphasis on church furnishings; and from the 1880s branded goods made their appearance. It is argued that an analysis of businesses that served a religious market in this period demonstrates the importance of specific forms of material culture in embedding a sacramentalist, devotional Catholicism in Ireland, and suggests that standardised objects may have been a significant factor in regularising religious expression and experience.
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Jun 1, 2012
Open House Dublin . Irish Architecture Foundation. 7–9 October 2011 Henrietta Street, 8 October 2... more Open House Dublin . Irish Architecture Foundation. 7–9 October 2011 Henrietta Street, 8 October 2011. We are in theatrical surroundings: a short, sloped cul-de-sac in an unloved part of Dublin’s northern inner city, lined with thirteen enormous, stark Georgian houses of which a few have been restored, while the others are intact but tottering. There is a crowd of people, nervous and excited as befits the drama of the place, and jostling to be among the first to have access to number 10. Probably built in the late 1720s, this was the townhouse of Luke Gardiner, the developer who created some of the most important urban set pieces of Dublin, including this one, the city’s grandest residential street from the early eighteenth century (Figure 1). Groups of ten at a time are admitted for tours all afternoon, and are lucky to be guided by an architect who knows the much-remodeled house intimately and is from the firm that recently carried out conservation and restoration work on it. Now a Catholic convent, on any other day of the year 10 Henrietta Street is only accessible to its resident nuns and their guests. But this is Open House weekend, when buildings all over the city and suburbs of Dublin can be visited by anyone interested in architecture, and, in many cases, willing to wait in line. This year’s program involves 130 events including building visits, walking tours, exhibitions and symposia. Figure 1 10 Henrietta Street, 1720s, Dublin (Irish Architecture Foundation) The first Open House was held in London almost twenty years ago, and the idea has spread around the world. While the Open House Worldwide network has twelve official members including Open House Tel Aviv, openhousenewyork and Open House Melbourne; related events include “Doors Open” weekends in many American cities. Dublin’s Open House is distinctive in being directed by an organization with a specific …
Snapshot stories: visuality, photography, and the social history of Ireland, 1922–2000. By Erika Hanna. Pp 288. Oxford University Press. 2020. £60 hardback
Bodily-Material Culture Techniques in the Spaces of the Devotional Revolution
Journal of Victorian Culture, Mar 31, 2023
This essay addresses how new procedural knowledge was promoted during the devotional revolution i... more This essay addresses how new procedural knowledge was promoted during the devotional revolution in nineteenth-century Ireland, particularly in relation to bodily-material culture techniques. It argues that a more orthopraxic physical disposition was a significant aspect of the experience and practice of Catholicism, and suggests ways of thinking about that in relation to religious imagination and space. In this, it sees bodies as connected to artefacts through material practices. The bodily-material culture techniques under discussion include gesture, ways of interacting with objects and spaces, and in general the embedding of new forms of material knowledge and body schema. In this, this essay re-examines the relationship between religious and secular space during this period. On the one hand, at this time the intense construction and prominent siting of thousands of religious buildings including churches, denominational institutions and entire urban quarters suggest that sacred and secular spaces were highly defined and circumscribed. However, a focus on bodies and objects also suggests the idea of immanence, and a more fluid inter-relationship between sacred and profane space than might be generally considered. The contribution draws largely on regulatory and instructive literature including catechisms and popular devotional tracts, personal testimony and specific liturgical and devotional objects and spaces.
3 5 D es ig n an d C ul tu re Indeed his seemingly melting black couch from 1964 is one of the ex... more 3 5 D es ig n an d C ul tu re Indeed his seemingly melting black couch from 1964 is one of the exhibition’s highlights. (On loan from Aagaard Andersen’s children, it, like many of the exhibition’s objects, is rarely available to the public.) It is made from urethane, a synthetic powder that, when mixed with a foaming agent – usually a combination of Freon and water – expands into a resilient mass and acquires a tough skin. This is the couch Aagaard Andersen lived with, its smooth black surface now decaying from use. But though the skin is breaking down, it nevertheless makes clear Aagaard Andersen’s break with existing design technique and style. In contrast to more traditional Danish design, made of wood crafted by cabinetmakers, Aagaard Andersen crafted his chair from a ‘spurious’ material that gave off deadly fumes, but that permitted him to fabricate a design entirely of one substance and without any mechanical joints. The couch shown in company with Ord (1964–65), Aagaard Andersen’s sculptural polyurethane wall hanging that, like a three-dimensional Ed Ruscha, spells out “ord,” Danish for “word.” The juxtaposition makes clear that both blur the lines between design and sculpture. The exhibition is most interesting when it draws out these relationships between Aagaard Andersen’s work across medium. The curators would have done well to highlight more of these relationships, especially alongside more in-depth explanations of the historical context. A simple, almost puritanical exhibition with few wall texts and little photographic documentation, it seemed at times too stylish, focused on design as art instead of design in use. Curator Vibeke Petersen’s forthcoming publication on Aagaard Andersen will, hopefully, correct this, providing the historical context that the exhibition lacked.
For almost thirty years and through a series of more than forty television programmes, David Shaw... more For almost thirty years and through a series of more than forty television programmes, David Shaw-Smith has chronicled Irish craft workers, and in doing so has created an unmatched record of individuals, tech-niques and artefacts. His Hands documentaries for RTE (the Irish ...
Vintage values: Classic pamphlet cover design from twentieth-century ireland
Material Religion, Sep 1, 2014
Just before he died, the Irish writer John McGahern (1934–2006) described the country he grew up ... more Just before he died, the Irish writer John McGahern (1934–2006) described the country he grew up in as “a theocracy in all but name,” where the Catholic Church had “absolute power” (McGahern 2006: 63, 64). The clergy dominated much of Irish life, and from the mid-1920s in particular they were aided and abetted by a number of lay organizations. Few were more powerful than the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland (CTSI). Founded as a branch of the English Catholic Truth Society in 1899, the CTSI are well known for their role in pressing the Irish government to pass censorship legislation, leading to the severe Censorship of Publications Act in 1929. The CTSI’s core aim was the distribution of inexpensive Catholic reading material, a moral bulwark against cheap and “dangerous” publications. They carried out this work with great vigor—from 1925 to the early 1970s, the CTSI distributed more than a million pamphlets every year. In 1969, the organization was reined in to the Catholic Communications Institute of Ireland, their publishing branch becoming “Veritas,” their core activity now the publication of religious textbooks. Owing to their role in Ireland’s draconian censorship regime, to many cultural historians the CTSI epitomize the insular and conservative image of midtwentieth-century Ireland. However, that didn’t prevent them from embracing aspects of cultural modernity, not least in their pamphlet designs. In 1953, Father Peter Birch outlined what was appropriate for the design of such objects: “Pamphlets must be bright, cheerful and topical. We must use modern methods of production, display and salesmanship” (McCormack 2013: 5). The commercial artists who worked on the pamphlets certainly followed that brief. The original artwork was discovered in two filing cabinets by Lir Mac Cárthaigh, the Art Director of Veritas. He was astonished by what he found. Expecting to uncover crude line-art and blurry pious imagery, Mac Cárthaigh was faced with hundreds of vividly colored paragons of commercial art. The punchy titles of the pamphlets were similarly a surprise, but one that chimed with their design, including “Modesty and Modernity,” “Divorce is a Disease,” “Fashionable Sins” (Figure 1), and “What! Me a Saint?” In recognition of their value as material culture, and their potential appeal to designers and illustrators, Mac Cárthaigh set about scanning the pamphlets, his work resulting in an exhibition at the National Print Museum, a publication, a website (http://www.vintagevalues.com/), limited-edition posters, and sets of slickly packaged postcards.
The article argues that the debate around Italian Renaissance disegno has tended to overemphasize... more The article argues that the debate around Italian Renaissance disegno has tended to overemphasize the rhetoric promoting a separation between design and execution, mind and body, and asserting a hierarchy of the arts constructed on the friction between intellectual and corporeal engagement in the making of artefacts. Building on written sources such as so-called "technical treatises" and on objects taken as evidence of the design process, it is suggested that we should consider instead a more integrated, organic, technologically engaged and "mechanical" notion of disegno, in which design might be seen to grow within a physical environment from the interconnection of human action and materials. Using Renaissance pottery as a case study, and exploring its understanding within different linguistic, literary and material contexts, the article proposes an epistemology allowing for greater fluidity, overlap and communality between supposedly distinct arts. The emergenc...
This essay addresses how new procedural knowledge was promoted during the devotional revolution i... more This essay addresses how new procedural knowledge was promoted during the devotional revolution in nineteenth-century Ireland, particularly in relation to bodily-material culture techniques. It argues that a more orthopraxic physical disposition was a significant aspect of the experience and practice of Catholicism, and suggests ways of thinking about that in relation to religious imagination and space. In this, it sees bodies as connected to artefacts through material practices. The bodily-material culture techniques under discussion include gesture, ways of interacting with objects and spaces, and in general the embedding of new forms of material knowledge and body schema. In this, this essay reexamines the relationship between religious and secular space during this period. On the one hand, at this time the intense construction and prominent siting of thousands of religious buildings including churches, denominational institutions and entire urban quarters suggest that sacred and secular spaces were highly defined and circumscribed. However, a focus on bodies and objects also suggests the idea of immanence, and a more fluid interrelationship between sacred and profane space than might be generally considered. The contribution draws largely on regulatory and instructive literature including catechisms and popular devotional tracts, personal testimony and specific liturgical and devotional objects and spaces.
The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Cultures , 2018
Chapter from The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Cultures, edited by Marguérite Corporaal... more Chapter from The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Cultures, edited by Marguérite Corporaal et. al., Liverpool University Press 2018. It examines the visual and material culture of Irish Catholicism in relation to system, affect and display through addressing liturgical objects, religious images and public ritual, mobilising the political theology of Giorgio Agamben.
This article addresses the material culture of Catholicism in Ireland from the late 1830s to the ... more This article addresses the material culture of Catholicism in Ireland from the late 1830s to the mid-1890s through a close examination of the advertisements carried by the Irish Catholic Directory. It explores the origins, dissemination and types of goods advertised over this time period. This is considered in four distinct phases: up to the late 1840s, liturgical equipment formed the bulk of the advertisements; from the late 1840s to the 1860s there was a new focus on devotional objects for the laity; from the 1860s there was an emphasis on church furnishings; and from the 1880s branded goods made their appearance. It is argued that an analysis of businesses that served a religious market in this period demonstrates the importance of specific forms of material culture in embedding a sacramentalist, devotional Catholicism in Ireland, and suggests that standardised objects may have been a significant factor in regularising religious expression and experience.
Uniform: clothing and discipline in the modern world, 2019
This volume examines the role uniform plays in public life and private experience. It explores th... more This volume examines the role uniform plays in public life and private experience. It explores the social, political, economic, and cultural significance of various kinds of uniforms to consider how they embody gender, class, sexuality, race, nationality, and belief. From the pageantry of uniformed citizens to the rationalizing of time and labour, this category of dress has enabled distinct forms of social organization, sometimes repressive, sometimes utopian. With thematic sections on the social meaning of uniform in the military, in institutions, and political movements, its use in fashion, in the workplace, and at leisure, a series of case studies consider what sartorial uniformity means to the history of the body and society.
THE SECRET LIVES OF OBJECTS HIDDEN HISTORIES OF DUBLIN DESIGN, 2015
A collection of essays on objects and material culture in the collection of the Little Museum of ... more A collection of essays on objects and material culture in the collection of the Little Museum of Dublin. Researched and written by students on the MA Design History and Material Culture, National College of Art and Design, Dublin. Edited by Lisa Godson, Programme Leader.
Modern Religious Architecture in Germany, Ireland and Beyond Influence, Process and Afterlife since 1945, edited by Kathleen James Chakraborty and Lisa Godson, 2019
This chapter from Modern Religious Architecture in Germany, Ireland and Beyond (Bloomsbury, 2019)... more This chapter from Modern Religious Architecture in Germany, Ireland and Beyond (Bloomsbury, 2019) addresses the phenomenon of architects designing buildings for missionary orders based in Africa in the mid-20th Century. It takes as its central case study the work of Irish architect Pearse McKenna, analysing his working methods and built output.
the Easter Rising is a key element of Irish national consciousness – a foundation myth around whi... more the Easter Rising is a key element of Irish national consciousness – a foundation myth around which shared identities have been constructed, sometimes emphasising, and sometimes obscuring the bitterness of the subsequent Civil War. yet, the Rising itself has long formed a focus of heated debate: what happened, how and why; its role and significance in the emergence of the Irish state; the wisdom – military, political and ideological – of the leaders. It is no surprise, then, that there is a wealth of detailed historical research on the 1916 Rising and its aftermath, with the release of new material (such as the launch of the online Military service (1916–23) pensions Collection in January 2014) treated as newsworthy by the national media. yet, in popular imagination and experience, the period is often evoked in other terms: mementoes passed down from grandparents, images of patrick pearse encountered on classroom walls and coins, the bullet-scarred facade of the Royal College of surgeons. It is this body of material and visual culture that forms the focus of this volume. A wealth of objects and images survive from the Rising – as well as from later events that commemorated it – in museums and archives, as part of the streetscape, and in private ownership. these range from the informal to the formal, from buttons cut from the tunics of Volunteers, to photographs of the ruined General post office and objects looted during Easter Week, each drawn into practices that rework the meaning and significance of the Rising by and for different audiences. the objects of the Rising – from the proclamation of the Republic to scrapbooks containing memorial cards for the leaders – are key to the construction of both personal and official histories. However, such items have yet to form a focus of sustained academic enquiry. this volume does not aim to summarise or critically evaluate the events of the Rising (for this, see the many published historical analyses of the period, e.g.
The 'snapshot' in the title of this valuable book by Erika Hanna works in two ways. It denotes bo... more The 'snapshot' in the title of this valuable book by Erika Hanna works in two ways. It denotes both the photography that is the main focus of the text, and the author's approach that offers a deft succession of themes and case studies fixed on photographic production in twentieth-century Ireland. It is published at a time that historians in Ireland increasingly draw on and refer to visual and material culture in their work, but often without due consideration or understanding of the conditions within which such cultural artefacts were made or understood. As Hanna outlines in the introduction, the work builds on 'an exciting field of Irish photographic history' (p. 9), which she later says has mainly been understood through 'the dynamic of the colonial gaze' (p. 10), although those dynamics are rendered more complex if we include exhibitions and publications such as the excellent Source magazine. She aligns her concerns more with recent currents in Irish social history and is particularly interested in how people used photography 'in order to mediate, interpret, and interrogate their understanding of state and nation, and their place within it' (p. 13). Organised around six chapters, Hanna fits an impressive amount of information and analysis into what is a relatively short book. She asserts that it is about 'what it meant to see in Ireland during the twentieth century' (p. 1), and this pithy phrase of course needs to be further qualified, as her starting points are with the producers of photographic images rather than their consumers or viewers, and the book is about seeing through photographs and the tools used to make them, not other forms of visual culture such as advertisements, graphic design, fine art or film. She provides useful ways into thinking about seeing more generally, including a helpful discussion about how metaphors of visibility and invisibility have been mobilised in Irish historiography. A winning quality of the volume is the sense of discovery Hanna makes the reader feel, most strongly communicated in the first chapter which starts with an evocative vignette about how we might respond when we come across an old photograph album in an archive or a junk shop, how they hold both a sense of familiarity but unknowingness, how the album 'frustrates as it beguiles' (p. 16). Giving some sense of the wealth of albums in the National Photographic Archive, she then concentrates on three examples, and what they suggest about 'how young people curated and narrated stories of their lives'. This includes what they made visible and what they kept secret. One fascinating case study involves the twenty-three albums of Dorothy Stokes (1898-1982), a woman who was deeply involved in the musical life of Ireland, eventually becoming Professor of Theory and of Piano at the 'Royal Academy of Music' (p. 25), presumably the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin. Her albums, made between 1925 and 1953, document an urban and bohemian life largely focused around her close female friends, her holidays in Ireland and Europe, and include depictions of herself with images of her cars, often with the legend 'Owner and Owned'. Hanna's discussion of how such captions reinforced or provided counterpoints to the images, and how albums create particular narratives is importanttoo often historians use or discuss photographs wrested away from their captions and their actual material setting and relationality within the implied narrative of an album, or on a particular page of a newspaper. Noting what Stokes did not include in the albumsparticularly her intimate relationships-Hanna shows how she both asserted an agency that exceeded the prevailing ideals of Irish womanhood but in its visual record was confined by the norms of snapshot photography. This theme of established practice determining what was and was not photographed pervades the book, and the significance of self-presentation according to certain conventions is to the fore in the second chapter, which deals with studio portraiture and visual tropes of respectability. The case studies are drawn from the archives of two Waterford studios, and are highly suggestive about the maintenance of familial image and wider bonds through the display and circulation of photographs as well as the techniques the studios employed to mask hard-working hands and tired eyes. The third chapter addresses photography clubs and how they visualised the Irish landscape, a subject that warrants deeper Irish Historical Studies 354
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2012
Open House Dublin . Irish Architecture Foundation. 7–9 October 2011 Henrietta Street, 8 October 2... more Open House Dublin . Irish Architecture Foundation. 7–9 October 2011 Henrietta Street, 8 October 2011. We are in theatrical surroundings: a short, sloped cul-de-sac in an unloved part of Dublin’s northern inner city, lined with thirteen enormous, stark Georgian houses of which a few have been restored, while the others are intact but tottering. There is a crowd of people, nervous and excited as befits the drama of the place, and jostling to be among the first to have access to number 10. Probably built in the late 1720s, this was the townhouse of Luke Gardiner, the developer who created some of the most important urban set pieces of Dublin, including this one, the city’s grandest residential street from the early eighteenth century (Figure 1). Groups of ten at a time are admitted for tours all afternoon, and are lucky to be guided by an architect who knows the much-remodeled house intimately and is from the firm that recently carried out conservation and restoration work on it. Now a Catholic convent, on any other day of the year 10 Henrietta Street is only accessible to its resident nuns and their guests. But this is Open House weekend, when buildings all over the city and suburbs of Dublin can be visited by anyone interested in architecture, and, in many cases, willing to wait in line. This year’s program involves 130 events including building visits, walking tours, exhibitions and symposia. Figure 1 10 Henrietta Street, 1720s, Dublin (Irish Architecture Foundation) The first Open House was held in London almost twenty years ago, and the idea has spread around the world. While the Open House Worldwide network has twelve official members including Open House Tel Aviv, openhousenewyork and Open House Melbourne; related events include “Doors Open” weekends in many American cities. Dublin’s Open House is distinctive in being directed by an organization with a specific …
The relation of design to historical events is generally overlooked by Irish historians of all pe... more The relation of design to historical events is generally overlooked by Irish historians of all persuasions. This new anthology of 22 essays aims to reposition a range of quotidian and mundane Irish objects, emanating from a specific historical moment, into the expanded field of historical signification through a highly theorised framework drawn from material culture studies. To do this each contributor takes the events of the armed insurrection mounted by Irish republicans in Dublin during 24-29 April 1916, the first step on the revolutionary path to Irish independence and known as the Easter Rising, and/or their aftermath, as a starting point. The editors, Lisa Godson and Joanna Brück, contend that the Rising is 'a key element of Irish consciousness-a foundation myth around which shared identities have been constructed', and assert their desire not to 'summarise or critically evaluate the events' but rather reconsider the 'material and visual culture of 1916 to include not only inert, bounded artefacts but also material practices, whether of the body or the ways places are interacted with' (pp.1-2). The chapters all originate in papers given at a conference held in Dublin on 26-27 April 2013, entitled Object Matters: Making 1916, convened by the editors. 1 The excellent introduction briefly sets out some of underlying and unifying ideas and explains the division of the book into four sections, dealing with the broad concepts of materiality, affectivity, revivalism and memory, but it doesn't say why the essays are divided into '17 short case studies' and 'five longer and more in-depth essays' (p. 2). Neither do the editors actually clarify the events of the 'Easter Rising of 1916' or their position (do they subscribe to orthodox or revisionist views, for instance), which did feel necessary given that the book is published in England and some of its potential audience may not be familiar with even the basic facts. However, the editors convincingly argue that the Easter Rising offers unprecedented opportunity to interrogate 'how discourses of authenticity are constructed around particular objects' in a specifically Irish context (p. 7). Employing material culture as a broad theoretical framework to unify the diverse foci of the chapters, which encompass studies of heritage policy, museology, the built environment, actual objects, spaces, souvenirs, performances, photography and painting, supports their desire to affirm that
The script for my contribution to 'Mayday', an event curated by Hugh Campbell and Nathalie Weadic... more The script for my contribution to 'Mayday', an event curated by Hugh Campbell and Nathalie Weadick held in connection with the exhibition ‘I see Earth’ by architect Tom de Paor on 1 May 2022 at Visual, Carlow, Ireland
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Papers by Lisa Godson