The lines between: reframing postmemory, national identity and the moving image in Ireland’s borderlands

Abstract

This practice-based PhD in Art & Design (lens-based art and the moving image) explores postmemory and national identity in the Irish borderlands. It examines how border-dwellers negotiate identities shaped by partition and inherited memory, and the role of lens-based and moving-image art in challenging fixed narratives of collective memory.

Methodologically, this project combines practice-based research, critical reflection, an autoethnographic approach, and a textual analysis of visual art in Northern Ireland. A theoretical framework influenced by Marianne Hirsch and Jacques Rancière inspired a bricolage of techniques in my practice, including archival reappropriation, documentary, fictional narrative, and the incorporation of oral history. This approach facilitated the making of the work and the analysis: the films test visual strategies of representation while the written thesis situates and critically reflects on these experiments.

The practice made as part of this research project is a series of short films that interrogate the fluid and contested nature of national identity and memory within the Irish borderlands. Existing works often focus on a detached historical or political analysis of the border, without the local population’s presence, voices or stories. My films foreground the everyday experience of border spaces as a practitioner raised in post-conflict times in Donegal in the Northwest of Ireland. These experiments demonstrate that a hybrid docu-fictional approach, combining fiction and the reworking of archival materials, makes visible the affective and embodied dimensions of border life that are often marginalised.

This project contributes a practice-based framework for representing postmemory in border contexts, a body of films as research outcomes, and a critical account of methods useful to artist-researchers and scholars of Irish visual culture, border studies, and memory studies. Overall, it reframes the visual representation of Ireland’s border by inserting situated, everyday narratives into the field.

Date of Award	May 2026
Original language	English
Supervisor	Clare Gallagher (Supervisor), Ken Grant (Supervisor) & Paul Seawright (Supervisor)