Swimming to Inishkeel
Ekstasis
Concrete Republic
Traffic Island 
Prison Farm

Watchtower
Katrina
The Dog Tail Wars
Empire/Umpire
Hostis
Body Fluid Bed
Hanging Creatures

Homeless Deaths  
Poster Project
Full Shackle
Sapa
Swollen Eye
Frontiers
Deed

Every Revolution
Forces
Boarder
Surveillance Chair
Suite
Cruise Control

Ostrich
The Big Silence
Asylum Screamed
Think No Evil
Belfast
Crisus

THE WALLSTEADS OF CIVILIZATION
CONCRETE REPUBLIC

2011-2013

Wallsteads of Civilization
Acadiana Center for the Arts, Lafayette, LA, 2013
Cardak Ni Na Nebu Ni Na Zemlja,
Barrister’s Gallery, New Orleans, LA, 2013
drawnOVERdrawn, Wandesford Quay Gallery, Cork, Ireland, 2012
drawnOVERdrawn, The Drawing Project, Dun Laoghaire, Ireland, 2012
Are We There Yet, The Warehouse, Glenties, Ireland, 2012
As part of the Earagail Arts Festival & the MacGill School
St. Claude, Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans, LA

Concrete Republic
Sternstudio, Vienna, Austria, 2011
Balor Arts Centre, Donegal, Ireland, 2011


The Wallsteads of Civilization
From the ringforts of the pre-Christian Celtic civilization through the 5th and 6th century monasteries to the ruins of cottages whose tenants were evicted during the famine of the 1840’s and plantation houses burned during the civil war after Irish independence in 1922, Ireland’s history can be documented by her wallsteads. They stand in the landscape reminding us of the long and turbulent history the country has endured.

After the economic collapse of the Irish economy in 2008, a new type of ruin was added to the roster. These are not the ruins that held the illuminated manuscripts or defended us against the Vikings. These are the ruins of houses yet to be lived in, these are contemporary ruins without a history. When the economic collapse occurred, it was sudden. In some cases workers arrived in the morning to find the construction site in the hands of the bank. Today there are 2,800 Ghost Estates littering the Irish landscape. These wallsteads stand not as a testament to Irelands’ heroic or ecclesiastical past, but instead as monuments to speculative greed and unregulated capitalism.

Background to Concrete Republic
I began to notice the number of Ghost Estates (half built subdivisions) littering the Donegal landscape, the detritus of the economic boom. Though I currently live in New Orleans I grew up in Donegal. Moving in and out of empty houses while photographing these Ghost Estates felt eerily familiar to me, previously I had documented Post Katrina neighborhoods in New Orleans. Yet these were not homes filled with a lifetime of belongings in compressed layers on the floor. These were cold concrete structures, colorless, characterless and above all lifeless; they seemed more like monuments or indeed large tombs burying the landscape below them. In the same way that Hurricane Katrina left whole blocks of homes destroyed and unoccupied with one or two homes renovated and lived in, the Ghost Estates have families living in some of the houses while others remain at various stages of completion.

I created a series of works while on sabbatical in Ireland I titled Concrete Republic that were in response to these Ghost Estates (this series was then completed in the US and exhibited under the title The Wallsteads of Civilization). I began by visiting various estates scattered throughout Donegal, documenting them through photographs, then recreating them through drawings. These drawings were then cut out and mounted unto a collaged landscape of planning permission forms, architects plans and real estate flyers echoing the way the actual houses awkwardly occupy their surrounding landscape.

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