For Those That Tell No Tales
Dara McGrath

For Those That Tell No Tales began as a series of conversations between Dara McGrath and Dan Breen, curator of Cork Public Museum, around how the museum and Cork city were to commemorate the Irish War of Independence. This kick-started a three year study of sites in and around the city. Preparation was taken before photographing each of the sites, extensive research included military statements, inquest reports, newspaper articles, historic archives and interviews with people in each locality. The landscape itself bears witness to these events and by photographing them, we are reinserted back into that fractured space, acknowledging their existence so that their histories will not be forgotten. What connects them both is the relationship they have to the notion of the ‘troubled landscape’.
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Dara McGrath’s central thematic concern lies in exploring transitional spaces, those in-between places where architecture, landscape and the built environment often intersect, and where a dialogue – of absence rather than presence – is created. His practice is driven by explorations of these charged, shifting entities – buildings that have come to the end of their functionality, the changing functionality of a landscape, human interruptions in the landscape – that exist in urban, rural and suburban contexts. McGrath has studied from 1994-1997 National Diploma in Photography, Dún Laoghaire College of Art and Design/Dublin (Ireland) and also 2003-2005 MA in Visual Arts Practice (Art-making), Institute of Art Design, and Technology Dublin.