Eimear Walshe: MIXED MESSAGES FROM THE IRISH REPUBLIC

Chapter opens a solo exhibition by Irish artist Eimear Walshe.

MIXED MESSAGES FROM THE IRISH REPUBLIC is Eimear Walshe’s first UK solo show and features new and existing works including ROMANTIC IRELAND which was presented at the Irish Pavilion for the 2024 Venice Biennale of Art. Walshe has also created new site-specific commissions for Chapter’s cafe and the 18 metre-wide billboard above its entrance.

Through video and sculpture the exhibition explores the love and grief for a land entangled in colonial legacies, revolution, rebellion and undelivered promise.

Walshe explores how the impact of Irish land struggles have shaped sexual politics, property ownership and power in Ireland today. Their work is rooted in community and collaboration, playfully using forms of popular culture from infomercials to soaps to navigate urgent issues of housing precarity, national identity and activism.

In The Land Question: Where the fuck am I supposed to have sex? (2020), Walshe takes on the persona of a TV presenter, with deadpan delivery and comic timing, they contemplate the ways our most intimate desires and interactions are entwined with the politics of land.

LAND CRUISER (2022), continues this theme. Narrated by two protagonists who meet cruising, the pair embark on a bleak road trip across the Irish housing market and through the geographies of 19th century land contestation.

The three-channel video ROMANTIC IRELAND (2024) tells parallel stories of complicity, disavowal and betrayal. Set on the site of an unfinished house build and filmed on mobile phones, it stages dramatic encounters between a series of seven characters including a tenant farmer, a solicitor and a landlord played by Walshe who occupy a site under simultaneous construction and demolition. An opera composed by Amanda Feery with a libretto by Walshe is sung by a five-voice opera and describes the scene of an eviction. The sculpture that holds both the work and the viewer, echoes that seen on screen, made from locally sourced materials it speaks to the ancient practice of house-building and the Irish tradition of the ‘meitheal’: a gang of workers, neighbours, kith and kin who come together to build, harvest and cooperate in mutual aid.

Walshe’s new video work FREE STATE PANGS (2025) is about Irish bureaucracy and folklore, set between the provinces of Ulster and Connacht.

The exhibition will open with an evening of Irish tunes, songs and dance with the artist and their collaborators Dylan Kerr, Róis, Seamas Hyland and Know Yourself.

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Eimear Walshe ROMANTIC IRELAND (2024)
Image: Faolán Carey

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Generously supported by Culture Ireland.