New installation explores renewal from collective trauma

A new installation by multimedia artist Mimi Seery has opened at Athlone's Luan Gallery.

The installation, Walk on Air Against Your Better Judgment, borrowing its title from Seamus Heaney’s call to move beyond fear and convention, reflects on how inherited trauma shaped by entwined systems of power continues to inform Ireland’s collective identity.

Seery reimagines familiar materials as sites of renewal, inviting audiences to consider how transformation can emerge from exposure and illumination.

At the heart of the installation stands a fireplace—both domestic and sacred—within which rests a drawing of a wrapped present on fire. The image becomes a metaphor for multigenerational trauma, passed from hand to hand like a game of pass the parcel. The work suggests that what we inherit in fragments, including the false identities we’ve learned to perform, can be reformed through acts of release and creative reimagining.

Evoking the Celtic belief that night begins the day, Walk on Air Against Your Better Judgement moves between light and shadow, ending and renewal. Seery’s work seeks not to dwell in victimhood but to transcend it—offering space for reflection, resilience, and reconstruction of the self within a shared cultural landscape.

Supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Westmeath County Council, Arts & Disability Ireland, and Creative Ireland, Mimi Seery’s work has been exhibited at IMMA, Galway Arts Centre, and Luan Gallery.

This installation was supported by Westmeath County Council’s Brinsley MacNamara Award.