To be Irish at Christmas Gallery: Pebbledash Wonderland by Shane Lynam

As a specially commissioned piece for To Be Irish, District Magazine will pair up writers with visual artists to bring together different perspectives on what it means to be Irish at Christmas. 

There are certain parts of an experience that are so fundamental to it that we often are not even aware of it until someone makes it explicit. Karen Cogan’s prose ––commissioned for Homecoming, a short film about a young woman not being able to return home for Christmas––charts so beautifully, the arc of a Christmas break. Using tiny building blocks of banal memories, these eventually render a mosaic of deep emotion as they come together to form something infinitely greater than the sum of its parts.

Similarly, Shane Lynam manages to find aspects of Dublin that are so inherently Dublin that you only appreciate them once you’re confronted by them in a photograph. When we look at a subject that has so often been the subject of extremely clichéd depictions, Shane’s work is evidence of the fact that a true reading of Dublin, one that takes in all of the bizarre qualities of this place, can only come from someone who has dedicated themselves to cracking the city. Relentlessly beating the pavement, Shane is a collector and curator of ‘only in Dublin’ moments.

To read Homecoming, the complementary piece of writing by Karen Cogan, please click here.