Kieran Murray is a visual explorer and documentarist.

He seeks to uncover stories that connect people to the abandoned houses he continues to witness within Ireland’s rural landscapes.

Kieran has an archive of hundreds of photos of these cottages, buried in the landscape from Donegal-to-Cork, Galway-to-Wicklow. Working with the Festival, Kieran has selected an image collection that focuses on the domestic, honouring the everyday items that we may not think we need, but miss when we leave. The items that create nostalgia, or a hunger for ‘home’. These images concentrate on objects that provided nourishment or succour, warmth and safety; the memories of which we associate with home, shelter and care.

Below are a handlful of Kieran’s images. For the Festival, the selection will be expanded to 50 images that refelect ‘hunger’; hunger for safety, home, domestic comfort and sanctuary. Be sure to come back to see the fuller exhibit.

This work contributes to our Heritage work strand.

Don’t miss our online event –Looking at Times Past Today– with Kieran at 2pm on 27 Oct 2022. Click here to learn more and book.

Click on any image to bring out a full screen version of the image, then scroll to see all images.

Gallery 1

This gallery has just 10 pictures, which have been up in the run up to the Festival. Gallery 2 has almost 40 more images, shared especially for #LIF2022. These will only be available until the Festival’s end.

Gallery 2

The selection made available below is in no particular order. The selection is taken from across many years and are of several houses, in lots of locations. We have chosen images that depict objects that prick our memory. Transformed by time and neglect, they remind of of things we use, see everyday and know, but that sit beyond use today. They tell stories of domestic life; celebrations past and lives come and gone. From the banal to the beautiful; the mundane to the iconographic… Kieran’s photography pays homage not just to the objects as he finds them, but the fingerprints of those that used and respected them, whenever that was.