To Guide Shadows
Old Church, Grangegorman Campus
Dublin, Ireland
2023
Photos by Silvina Sisterna
To Guide Shadows


To Guide Shadows is a multisensorial installation in which ritual vernacular objects artistically activate space, holding the gesture of ritual acts and containing their own independent animate interiority and materiality. 

This body of work merges the personal and the socio political. Informed by broader research interests, political analysis and personal experience of mourning the death of the her husband during the isolation of the Covid-19 lockdowns, this work is offered as both a prefigurative resistance to the organised abandonment of the state in collusion with capital, and a love letter to the artist’s late husband. The work responds to the disappearance of formalised rituals in contemporary western society and the implications this disappearance has for grieving bodies, atomised by late-stage racial capitalism.



©Emily Waszak 2024