[We Must Not Act Like] Children of our Parents^[1]
___________________

^[1] There is a hierarchy that exists on the page. What is written up there is more important to the narrative than what is written down here–or so it appears. We can read a text and never flick our eyes down to the bottom of the page to read the corresponding footnotes. We will still be able to understand and follow the story or argument created by the writer–or so we have come to believe. It is easy to imagine that the hierarchy positions the footnote as less important than the main text body–but we would be wrong to think that. What is written down here in the footnotes is what gives a text legitimacy. What is written down here in the footnotes is what props up the ideas in the prose. These footnotes and references exert a silent power.

If we do not understand the mechanisms at play in the space of the page then we do not truly understand the story. As a writer, this means being very careful about who you put down here. Who are your kings and queens? Will it be one of the old guard (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan) or will you try to find a new chorus (Audre Lorde, Hannah Arendt, John Berger)? As writers, we need to be aware of who we are continuing to elicit power from and why. Are we using a footnote as a plinth to show off our shiny new idea–could it be that we are hoping to sound fancy, knowing or serious? Are we even aware of how we are building and shaping our words, of whose shoulders we are standing on (and on whose necks we continue to stomp)? As writers, it is important to consider the dynamics implicit in this space. This is an inherited system; these grammars come from another time; this is a world created by our ‘parents’.

As writers, readers, viewers and political people alike, Lynn-Marie Dennehey’s exhibition ‘[We Must Not Act Like] Children of our Parents’ implores us to question and consider received legacies and wisdoms. Our experience of space is influenced by the structures and architecture that pervades our societies; how the public realm (including the page and the gallery) is fabricated, impacts our psyche, shapes our imagination and our value systems. An aesthetic closely aligned with Western notions of civilisation and our societal systems is Neoclassicism. This type of design aims to connect with the ancient Greek and Roman traditions and thus create a claim to power and some kind teleological connection to ideas of progress. In “Anois ar theacht an tSamhraidh”: Ireland, Colonialism and the Unfinished Revolution (Beyond The Pale Books; Belfast, 2021) by Robbie McVeigh and Bill Rolston, the authors argue that when emulating neoclassical architecture ‘the mythologised power of classical empire and colony continues to inform the model of its modern iteration.’ We all know what a big pair of columns at the entrance of a building means–we can feel it. Columns mean a prestigious history, weight and grandiosity; they mean dualisms, class structures and oppression. They mean WE (the holders of power, the political class) are very big and we (the sorry souls who vote for them) are very small. Often this aesthetic is a direct expression of state power and is an attempt to convince us that there is an order to things and these things should not–and cannot–be questioned.

In Ireland, however, the situation is complex. Some of our infrastructure is made up of instruments of Empire; historical designs that express British colonial influence on our isles. These structures tell stories of oppression but also collusion. Artist and writer Clodagh Assata Boyce recently wrote a reflection on her experience of Dublin from a Trini-Irish perspective. She documents her difficulty in discovering that some buildings were built from the profits of the Atlantic-Slave trade in her text ‘Ireland and the White Spatial Imaginary (?)’ for Bless The Corners of This House (Bloomers; Cork, 2025). Equally, some of our infrastructure looks imperial because we suffer from a lack of imagination; as a colonised nation, we couldn’t think of another language to express ourselves within–it had been taken from us. Marianne Keating’s multi-channel film installation An Ciúnas / The Silence (2023) traces the struggle for self-determination following independence in Jamaica and Ireland. Her work considers what ‘independence’ actually means in the context of colonialism. Worst of all, some of this architecture is employed strategically; as our government today decidedly commits to a politics of neoliberalism and they use these tried and tested methods to assert class dominance.

‘[We Must Not Act Like] Children of our Parents’ draws our attention to these visual power structures that we have become we blind to. Dennehey humorously inverts formalities and our expectations of a gallery space by creating a large print installation that covers the ceiling of Studio 12. At first, we may think there is nothing to see here, that we are moving freely through the room. However, on closer inspection, we see that we have been manipulated and that this experience has been specifically designed. A collection of prints on paper combine to depict the south colonnade of the British Museum in London. Across A4 pages, Dennehey collages, constructs and deconstructs the image to fit tidily into the many quirks of the gallery’s ceiling. Her choice of paper suggests that this demonstration of might is just that–it is an illusion. Dennehey’s title acts as a call to arms. It reads as an invitation to punch through this paper facade and to dream up a new vision for structuring and shaping our society. The architecture of our cultural subconscious floats above us. This is what we were given but we do not have to behave as if this is all we have got.

This reclaiming and reimagining of space is similar to Brian O’Doherty’s mural One, Here, Now (1996) at Sirius Arts Centre. During the period that O’Doherty was using this politically motivated moniker Patrick Ireland, the artist painted a large design in the Ogham language in an effort to contest the colonial language and history of the building (the former home of the Royal Yacht Club established in 1854). O’Doherty was particularly attuned to the stories curated by a space. His seminal essay ‘Inside The White Cube’ (Artforum, 1986), argued that the gallery was not a neutral zone. He asserted that the so-called ‘white cube’ carried with it an ideology that had its own implicit hierarchies. Dennehey’s installation can be understood as employing this argument in both how she treats the gallery–disrupting our typical wall-based or even floor-based encounter–and how she asks us to consider our encounters in space more broadly. Signs, signals and architecture are used as apparatus to tell a story. Dennehey asks us if we wish to retell it.

A major exhibition at Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2024, ‘Self-Determination: A Global Perspective’, looked at the artists’ role in ‘nation-building and statecraft’ in the period following the First World War. In a time of collapsing empires, methodologies and strategies emerged that formed new world visions. This text is positioned down here where power lurks; ‘[We Must Not Act Like] Children of our Parents’ throws our vision upwards and invites us to think of new ways to dream–can we deconstruct power structures together, finish the process of decolonisation and imagine something new?

^[1] There is a hierarchy that exists on the page. What is written up there is more important to the narrative than what is written down here–or so it appears. We can read a text and never flick our eyes down to the bottom of the page to read the corresponding footnotes. We will still be able to understand and follow the story or argument created by the writer–or so we have come to believe. It is easy to imagine that the hierarchy positions the footnote as less important than the main text body–but we would be wrong to think that. What is written down here in the footnotes is what gives a text legitimacy. What is written down here in the footnotes is what props up the ideas in the prose. These footnotes and references exert a silent power.

If we do not understand the mechanisms at play in the space of the page then we do not truly understand the story. As a writer, this means being very careful about who you put down here. Who are your kings and queens? Will it be one of the old guard (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan) or will you try to find a new chorus (Audre Lorde, Hannah Arendt, John Berger)? As writers, we need to be aware of who we are continuing to elicit power from and why. Are we using a footnote as a plinth to show off our shiny new idea–could it be that we are hoping to sound fancy, knowing or serious? Are we even aware of how we are building and shaping our words, of whose shoulders we are standing on (and on whose necks we continue to stomp)? As writers, it is important to consider the dynamics implicit in this space. This is an inherited system; these grammars come from another time; this is a world created by our ‘parents’.

As writers, readers, viewers and political people alike, Lynn-Marie Dennehey’s exhibition ‘[We Must Not Act Like] Children of our Parents’ implores us to question and consider received legacies and wisdoms. Our experience of space is influenced by the structures and architecture that pervades our societies; how the public realm (including the page and the gallery) is fabricated, impacts our psyche, shapes our imagination and our value systems. An aesthetic closely aligned with Western notions of civilisation and our societal systems is Neoclassicism. This type of design aims to connect with the ancient Greek and Roman traditions and thus create a claim to power and some kind teleological connection to ideas of progress. In “Anois ar theacht an tSamhraidh”: Ireland, Colonialism and the Unfinished Revolution (Beyond The Pale Books; Belfast, 2021) by Robbie McVeigh and Bill Rolston, the authors argue that when emulating neoclassical architecture ‘the mythologised power of classical empire and colony continues to inform the model of its modern iteration.’ We all know what a big pair of columns at the entrance of a building means–we can feel it. Columns mean a prestigious history, weight and grandiosity; they mean dualisms, class structures and oppression. They mean WE (the holders of power, the political class) are very big and we (the sorry souls who vote for them) are very small. Often this aesthetic is a direct expression of state power and is an attempt to convince us that there is an order to things and these things should not–and cannot–be questioned.

In Ireland, however, the situation is complex. Some of our infrastructure is made up of instruments of Empire; historical designs that express British colonial influence on our isles. These structures tell stories of oppression but also collusion. Artist and writer Clodagh Assata Boyce recently wrote a reflection on her experience of Dublin from a Trini-Irish perspective. She documents her difficulty in discovering that some buildings were built from the profits of the Atlantic-Slave trade in her text ‘Ireland and the White Spatial Imaginary (?)’ for Bless The Corners of This House (Bloomers; Cork, 2025). Equally, some of our infrastructure looks imperial because we suffer from a lack of imagination; as a colonised nation, we couldn’t think of another language to express ourselves within–it had been taken from us. Marianne Keating’s multi-channel film installation An Ciúnas / The Silence (2023) traces the struggle for self-determination following independence in Jamaica and Ireland. Her work considers what ‘independence’ actually means in the context of colonialism. Worst of all, some of this architecture is employed strategically; as our government today decidedly commits to a politics of neoliberalism and they use these tried and tested methods to assert class dominance.

______________

‘[We Must Not Act Like] Children of our Parents’ draws our attention to these visual power structures that we have become we blind to. Dennehey humorously inverts formalities and our expectations of a gallery space by creating a large print installation that covers the ceiling of Studio 12. At first, we may think there is nothing to see here, that we are moving freely through the room. However, on closer inspection, we see that we have been manipulated and that this experience has been specifically designed. A collection of prints on paper combine to depict the south colonnade of the British Museum in London. Across A4 pages, Dennehey collages, constructs and deconstructs the image to fit tidily into the many quirks of the gallery’s ceiling. Her choice of paper suggests that this demonstration of might is just that–it is an illusion. Dennehey’s title acts as a call to arms. It reads as an invitation to punch through this paper facade and to dream up a new vision for structuring and shaping our society. The architecture of our cultural subconscious floats above us. This is what we were given but we do not have to behave as if this is all we have got.

This reclaiming and reimagining of space is similar to Brian O’Doherty’s mural One, Here, Now (1996) at Sirius Arts Centre. During the period that O’Doherty was using this politically motivated moniker Patrick Ireland, the artist painted a large design in the Ogham language in an effort to contest the colonial language and history of the building (the former home of the Royal Yacht Club established in 1854). O’Doherty was particularly attuned to the stories curated by a space. His seminal essay ‘Inside The White Cube’ (Artforum, 1986), argued that the gallery was not a neutral zone. He asserted that the so-called ‘white cube’ carried with it an ideology that had its own implicit hierarchies. Dennehey’s installation can be understood as employing this argument in both how she treats the gallery–disrupting our typical wall-based or even floor-based encounter–and how she asks us to consider our encounters in space more broadly. Signs, signals and architecture are used as apparatus to tell a story. Dennehey asks us if we wish to retell it.

A major exhibition at Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2024, ‘Self-Determination: A Global Perspective’, looked at the artists’ role in ‘nation-building and statecraft’ in the period following the First World War. In a time of collapsing empires, methodologies and strategies emerged that formed new world visions. This text is positioned down here where power lurks; ‘[We Must Not Act Like] Children of our Parents’ throws our vision upwards and invites us to think of new ways to dream–can we deconstruct power structures together, finish the process of decolonisation and imagine something new?

Sarah Long