Roscommon Arts Centre presented Rockingham, an exhibition by Irish-born Australian artist Sean Rafferty. Sean’s project focuses on the remnants of the former Rockingham Estate, which encompasses Lough Key Forest Park and the farm of his late grandparents.

Rafferty created a monument in Lough Key Forest Park using fragments of the once great Rockingham House now strewn throughout the site of Kingston Hall, the former farmhouse of the Rockingham Demesne. In Rafferty’s words, it was “a gesture that recognises my family history in the context of the history of the area”.

A series of works based on this salvaging process were exhibited in Roscommon Arts Centre.

This exhibition and public intervention were programmed under the curatorial residency awarded by the Arts Council of Ireland.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Sean Rafferty was born in Galway in 1979, and is now based in Sydney. In recent projects he has adopted the role of collector, salvaging fragments from various locations and sources and arranging them according to sets of criteria. His current project focusses on the Australian fruit box as a device for conveying produce, but also for its role as a possible conveyor of meanings about ‘the land’ (in both in agricultural terms and as a landscape), and the people who live and work on it. Rafferty’s interest in the Irish landscape originates from his childhood experiences on the farms of his late grandparents in Co. Louth and Co. Roscommon. Each of these locations is steeped in significant mythologies and/or histories. The fragments he collected from his grandparent’s farm in Boyle, Roscommon, were made into compositions to form the project ‘Monuments of Fiction’, shown in Sydney and Melbourne in 2013. 

Sean Rafferty is currently undertaking a residency at the Fire Station Artist Studios, Dublin and was recently artist in residence with Waverley Council in Sydney. In 2013 he founded Breezeblock in Sydney, a project space that focuses on the exhibition of curated projects and printed material.