In this exhibition for Belfast International Arts Festival, O’Donoghue has expanded on the themes explored in the body of work One Hundred Years and Four Quarters commissioned by Galway International Arts Festival in 2016. Foregrounded are three new major works, some over six meters in length and an extended version of the moving sculpture A Distant Thunder.

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Cinema and cinematic scale are one of the motifs of the new tarpaulin paintings exhibited in Belfast which draw their inspiration from (the) early silent cinema, in particular the work of F. W. Murnau, himself a soldier, pilot and survivor of the First World War. The ghostly image of the departing ship (actually the wreck of The Plassy on Inis Oirr) evokes The Demeter of Bram Stoker’s Dracula as envisioned by Murnau in his 1922 masterpiece of German Expressionist cinema, Nosferatu.