Ghost Stories
2022
4K UHD with stereo audio
Duration: 17:15 mins 

With footage shot on an iPhone over the course of one evening, Ghost Stories uses the framework of the popular narrative form to assemble a series of semi-fictional vignettes around the death of the artist’s mother a decade ago, uncanny events and correlations in the years before and following, and a recent visit to the artist’s childhood home in the company of his young son. Blending personal recollection, magic realism, and the presentation of the paranormal as a metaphoric mode, the video work explores place memory, corporeality, absence and perception, and creates interwoven, often supernatural, readings of events. Just as the house, as well as the contents and bodies within it, seems to dissolve at times within a mist of coloured camera noise, the narration in Ghost Stories also generates a cloud of doubt and slippage around the actual and the spectral.

Camera, editing, script: Ciarán Walsh
Voiceover actor: Cathy Walsh
Voiceover recording: Moss Beynon Juckes

The development of this work was assisted by an Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland.