Abstract
Folklore casts long shadows, and this chapter sets out to trace the influence of folklore on contemporary Gothic art in Ireland, using the common trope of home as strange space. Recurrent fine art and literary iterations of the Irish home posit it as a problematic and contested place; a site of anxiety and terror. The Gothic home in contemporary Irish art practice is often portrayed as Unheimlich or uncanny, where the familiar has grown unfamiliar and strange (Jentsch 1906; Freud 1919). In the fine art practice of (among others) Alice Maher, Rita Duffy, Michael Fortune, Aideen Barry, Martina Cleary, and Anthony Haughey, home is represented as a place of permeability and of cultural otherness, or alterity. Images of the Gothic home also permeate the work of contemporary Irish writers, from the brooding house of The Book of Evidence (John Banville 1989), the nightmarish Monaghan homes of The Butcher Boy (Patrick McCabe 1992), to the claustrophobia of Room (Emma Donoghue 2012).
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