Sleeping Dogs Lie
Aoife Herrity

Rumours, secrets and absent memories can affect the stories we tell about ourselves and where we come from. Conflicting narratives, faulty recollections and admonishments often bring unsettling questions to the surface. These lingering questions sometimes reveal gaps; exposing ruptured and converging narratives, causing our personal and family histories to appear as multiple realities. By examining these altered narratives, how and why they are tampered with or ignored altogether can be very revealing.

Collective suppression and denial can tap into our deeper instincts tugging at our intuition and implicit memory, leaving us to decipher and reinterpret based on our knowledge at a given time. These uncovered histories can cause agitation and conflict within ourselves and our families; their very presence casting long shadows that follow us into adulthood.¹

Aoife Herrity (b. 1983, Dublin) is a visual artist based in Dublin, Ireland. She was nominated by PhotoIreland as an Irish Talent for the Futures European Photography Platform in 2021. In the same year Herrity was a recipient of the Irish Arts Council Agility Award. She has an MFA in Photography from Ulster University, where she developed her series Sleeping Dogs Lie.

TLP Editions are an ongoing collection of contemporary photographic projects in the form of accessible and inexpensive publications by PhotoIreland. These A5 sized booklets present a standard format throughout the series, with 36 pages each, a cover with a text block of under 140 words that introduces the project, and the title and the artist name only available on the contra cover. The project creates a node of opportunities as it allows photographers to enter the publishing arena, while facilitating access to contemporary artistic practices to the general public.²