HOME – Carrickmacross Workhouse

HOME in the Carrickmacross Workhouse

Audiovisual enhancements to a historic building tour ‘HOME’ is a 24-minute animated film made in the style of the copper-plate etchings in the illustrated newspapers of the 1840s. ‘HOME’ provides the climax to a suite of three audiovisual installations on the guided tour route through the Carrickmacross, Workhouse. ”HOME’ personalises the statistics of the Great Irish Famine (1846-1849). And details the brutal workhouse regime. The film’s unnamed protagonist is based on Rose Sherry, who has over 300 living descendants in Australia.

Many have travelled to Carrickmacross to honour the courage and resilience of Rose, who was a much-loved matriarch. ‘HOME’ highlights the forgotten story of the ”Earl Grey girls’. More than 4,000 teenage girls, orphaned by the famine, who were shipped to Australia from Irish workhouses by Earl Grey, Great Britain’s Colonial Secretary, to address the four-to-one. Gender imbalance in Britain’s Australian colonies. A projection on the wall of the atmospheric ‘haunted’ female orphan’s dormitory acts as an overture to ‘HOME’ A ghostly cascade of daguerreotype portraits of the Earl Grey Girls in later life. These images came from the Hyde Park Barracks Immigration Museum in Sydney. A meeting room beside the entrance lobby has a boardroom projection system.

Here, the tour guides can react to the particular interests of visitors by using an iPad to tailor their own interactive narratives on the fly. They can swoop around the digital site model at will. Clicking hot spots will trigger relevant pop-up scenes, and images taken from the ‘HOME’ audiovisual.