This work was exhibited in group show Aground at the former Masonic hall in Moville, County Donegal. Aground, produced by Loci art collective, was supported by the Donegal 2016: Cultural Expression programme.

In trying identities I reflect on the figures of Erskine Childers and Roger Casement. Childers was executed for treason by the Irish Free State government in 1922. Casement was executed for treason by the British government in 1916. I am interested in how both men negotiated a range of identifications and loyalties throughout their lives, and how difficult that became during violent conflict. Childers and Casement were poised precariously between fiercely opposed constructs: Englishness and Irishness, Protestantism and Catholicism, republicanism and imperialism. Because both men were celebrated for their writing – Childers’ novel, Riddle of the Sands, and Casement’s reports on labour abuses in the Congo and Putumayo – the work uses their words and words of others about them, as well as propaganda material from their political activities, to reflect on the power and failure of words to convince, claim, argue and persuade.