Denise O’Donoghue

In this body of work, I investigate the places of my mother’s early childhood in the 1930s and 1940s.

My mother is my inspiration. She intrigued us as children with stories of her childhood. She inspired creativity in us and gave us the freedom to explore freely. She also taught us to really see the world around us. Despite having grown up in wartime, a time of great deprivation, she has always spoken with joy about her childhood, where her house backed onto Blackrock Park, and the sea with Dublin Bay as the backdrop to her life.

In excluding people from this body of work, I attempt to create an atmosphere of quietness, a pause for reflection on all these places as they bear witness to the past.

This is a tribute to my mother, Elsie: a revisiting of the memories of her childhood and the stories of mine.