Photography of Dennis McNulty by Tim Maul

The following images were taken on my phone while walking in Walkinstown in Summer 2020. All the spaces documented here are tucked away behind standard suburban semi-detached and terraced houses. I presume these alleyways were intended to provide rear access to the houses lining the roads to the front. I hope to find a definitive answer to this question in the course of researching the history of the area and its planning. Over time, most residents have built some kind of structure at the end of their garden, a shed, a workshop or a gym. These buildings double as a secure boundary. As each was built by the individual owner at various times, to different plans and from different materials, they form an incredibly rich patchwork of vernacular architecture. As a consequence of this, the sides of the alleyways are uneven and textured, riddled with narrow gaps and strange angular spaces where non-orthogonal walls meet. Nature pokes through from all directions, pushing its way through the evidence of many generations of subcultural activity. I find myself reading these spaces in the same way a geologist reads the layers in sedimented rock. Their physical form exhibits the effects of slow change over a long period of time, change that was motivated by economic constraints, the ebb and flow of socio-cultural norms, perceived threats to survival and a whole mess of complex forces, some consciously registered and others bubbling away below the surface.

Dennis McNulty 11/20

The photograph as document cannot be peeled away from the biography of its maker. Walkinstown is the aptly named suburb of Dublin that I may have driven through during a impulsive (map-free) road trip I took between a B&B in Ranalagh and Thurles in Tipperary County (family). I was promptly lost, circling my way around featureless streets until finally giving into signage that directed me out. Mazes featured in cinema are conducive to panic if we lose orientation and collapse exhausted in