Reflecting on events, memories and the traces of evidence left to us from times past, O’Donoghue uses his family history to connect with and understand the wars that have shaped our histories; and reflects on the personal experiences of his grandfather, Hugh O’Donoghue, in the First World War and his father, Daniel O’Donoghue, during the Second World War. From his richly painted surfaces emerge fragments from the archive of his past, entwined with the disturbing resonance of war. 

 

Central to the exhibition is the sculpture A Distant Thunder, a reconstruction of a trench railway vehicle used to take injured men from the battlefields of World War I. The railway irons on which it runs carried the bodies of men from the battlefields of the Somme and Ypres.