homerun

Robert Hartpole Goes Home is an 8-channel video sculpture presented across 12 monitors, accompanied by a single-channel video (23 mins) installed alongside the original effigy of Robert Hartpole in Carlow County Museum.

The work responds to the legacy of 16th-century settler and sheriff Robert Hartpole, a figure associated with colonial violence and betrayal during the massacre at Mullaghmast, Co. Kildare. His decapitated tomb effigy, unearthed in 1809, becomes a point of departure for exploring themes of dislocation, historical erasure, and spectral return.

Embodying Hartpole through contemporary performer Dylan Nolan, the videos trace his imagined reappearance in a changed Irish landscape — moving through derelict estates, fragmented geographies, and lingering silences. The installation reflects on the afterlives of imperial memory, the persistence of absence, and the unstable ground between myth and history.