This work in progress is concerned with female members of the Irish diaspora living in England and is engaged with representational imagery and personal testimony from the Irish community ensuring the collective response to histories of migration. The women were photographed and interviewed about their experience of being Irish in London, their reasoning for emigrating and their thoughts about what home means to them. Interview questions were concerned with traditional ethnographic qualitative interview technique, using unstructured interview and prompts. The women were also interviewed about a particular object that had some significance to them and to Ireland. The women were filmed interacting with these objects, to show the haptic engagement of the subject with the object.

Aisling Keavey’s practice fuses the traditional with the contemporary and is concerned with issues of personal and collective history and the Irish Diaspora. Keavey’s research themes are manifested through image-based works that aim to inform the audience. By using photography and moving image, Keavey is preoccupied with the materiality images, the process through which the image is made, and informing and subverting the audience’s perception of a work. This approach considers how the physical and material process of the mechanical focusing of a lens is used as a metaphor to relate to political history and also as a method of research.