Dr Byrne has been invited to share her research in the context of the exhibition The Artist’s Eye: Liliane Lijn. Lijn’s film Look a Doll! My Mother’s Story (1998 – 2000) is currently on show in Gallery 2. The work, which dates from a relatively recent stage in the artist’s career, has its roots in a limited edition self-published book by the artist, Her Mother’s Voice (1996 – 1998). Following a disturbing dream, Lijn began to interview her mother, who endured persecution and forced migration as a result of the anti-Semitism and violence of Europe in the years leading up to World War II, and whose escape to America brought a painful loss of identity and sense of self. Look a Doll! My Mother’s Story continues the project of generational dialogue through filmed interviews with her mother, who was then experiencing the early stages of dementia, cut with photomontage and archival footage.

Dr Anne Byrne is a sociologist with a creative interest in narrative, biography, art and visuality. She has published on women in Irish society, feminist research methodologies and pedagogies, gender, identity, inequality, singleness, stigma, rural development and on the historiography of anthropological research in rural Ireland in the 1930s. Interested in obscure lives, subjectivities and identities, her current research, Narratives of Ireland, concerns community and individual biographies and stories as held in everyday artifacts, letters, diaries, paintings and archives in early to mid twentieth century Ireland. Some examples of written work include:

Byrne, A. 2018. ‘Autobiography, Chocolate Creams and Letterpress Printing’ in Virginia Woolf Bulletin, 57 (1): 24-31.
Byrne, Anne. 2016.

The Galway Art Gallery Collection and Roger Fry’s ‘The Pond’ (1921) in Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society 68, 181-216.

Byrne, A and Byrne, C. 2017. ‘Family Stories and Secret Keepers: Who is Maíre Bastable?’ in Ciara Boylan, Sarahanne Buckley and Pat Dolan (eds) Family Histories of the Irish Revolution. Four Courts Press: Dublin, 49-68.

Byrne, A. 2017. ‘Epistolary research relations: correspondences in anthropological research – Arensberg, Kimball and the Harvard-Irish Survey 1930-1936’ in O’Giollain, D. (ed), Irish Ethnologies, Notre Dame UP: USA, 58-87.

‘A Passion for Books: The early letters of Nancy Nolan to Leonard Woolf (1943-1944)’ in Virginia Woolf Miscellany, No 86, Fall 2014/Winter 2015, pp32-34, Southern Connecticut State University, USA.

Image: ‘Cloak and Combs’, courtesy of Dr Anne Byrne.