Great Expectations

As the youngest child and only daughter I’ve always had a complicated relationship with my father. A retired builder who moved with my mother from Ireland to London in the late seventies, he worked hard and struggled through hard times to raise our family. His youth in rural Ireland was just as tough, with time spent at one of the country’s most notorious industrial schools run by the merciless Christian Brothers. It was after his emancipation from Artane that he first moved to the UK as a child. Growing up in London while regularly returning to Ireland, I never felt like I quite fit in either place too.

 When my parent’s relationship eventually broke down in divorce, I was compelled to investigate my uneasy relationship with my father. I accompanied him as he travelling back to his ancestral home, attempting to capture something that might provide an insight. One of his lifelong passions has been walking. It could be that after his formative years spent locked up in the insular grey world of Artane, walking under the wide-open sky is more than a hobby.