At the end of last year, I was surprised and pleased that a text I wrote was announced as a runner up in the Sarah Cecilia Harrison Essay Prize at the National Gallery of Ireland. The prize is sponsored by the family of the artist and suffragette to reward new research and writing about women in Ireland’s visual culture, as a way of re-vivifying stories that have faded. The family have committed to run it for ten years, and I hope that there are plans to make a book of the 30 or so selected pieces of writing at the end of it all. I’d definitely read it.

My surprise at being selected was partly because the text, called Doubles: a new archive, hovers on the edge of what could be called an essay. The writer and theatre maker Gina Moxley (also my friend and taker of the photo above) coined the term ‘messay’ to describe it. Doubles is partly about stained glass artist Wilhelmina Geddes and painter and champion of artists Sarah Purser. But it is also about tennis, friendship, 24 Pembroke Street Upper, the feel of materials in your hands, and the vertiginous overwhelm of archival research. In it, I conjure an speculative archive into being through the reading of a list of the contents of an imagined archive box. The archive is of the relationship between three pairs of women, living in different centuries and overlapping at a particular location.

I gave the text its first public outing at the Hugh Lane Gallery in late November, where I was asked to read it to the Sarah Purser Study Morning. The text is accompanied by an archive box of specially made glasswork made by my old friend Susan O’Connor. I am hopeful that the work will be published later this year.