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Abstract
Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland is a fractured space. Spiritually, spatially, artistically, economically, epistemologically, Ireland is a whirlwind of subjectivity, fragmentation, and skepticism. This view forms an ontology filled with gaps, a grounding belief system of progress against a backdrop of something missing—something taken, or lost, or forgotten. It’s an overwhelming narrative of absence, one of many absences that still play out in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland. Naturally, the common reaction has been to heal these absences, move past them, resist them. But that has created a fixed notion of what absence is, thus making it difficult to contend with the dynamic complexity of absence. The purpose of this thesis is not to develop a complete definitional understanding of absence, but to provide a few tools to better explore absence in contemporary Irish media. Through three written chapters and an audiovisual installation, Ab Esse examines the need to redefine our relationship with absence in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.
