Drawing Commission

Client: UCD Press / School of Architecture UCD

Dates: October 2021 - April 2022

Category: Drawing

This drawing was made to accompany Professor Hugh Campbell’s essay „An untrustworthy composite doubly and trebly overlaid’: C.P. Curran’s photographs of Joyce and Dublin“, as part of the 2022 reissue of James Joyce Remembered by C.P. Curran. The drawing is used as the front cover for the book, as an accompanyment to Prof. Campbell’s text, and as a limited edition print combined with a special edition of the book.

Drawing was also published here on Places Journal in March 2022

This digital line drawing takes as its point of departure the moment C.P. Curran took his famous photograph of James Joyce in his parents’ back garden and extrapolates outwards from there, using historical photos, maps and current-day field surveys, as well as a little imagination, to unfold the wider scene of Phibsborough and environs in the early summer of 1904, from the potted plants within the greenhouse long gone, to the stone wall still standing, to the half-finished steeple of Phibsborough church. The drawing is part historical record, part research project, part fantasy, and uses the tools of architectural drawing to study and present a moment from the past in a new light, offering the resulting composite as a basis for discussion and debate about this pivotal moment in the life of James Joyce.