—Love, says Bloom looked at the deep love between Irish writer James Joyce, his wife Nora Barnacle,and their children Giorgio and Lucia, using music as a steadfast element in their lives. Giorgio trained as a singer, Lucia was an accomplished dancer, and all four Joyces often sang at the piano, with friends, for both celebration and succour.
The Joyces lived in a war-ruptured early twentieth-century Europe – in Pola, Trieste, Zürich, and Paris – and their native Ireland was also up-ended by division. In this exhibition, ran in celebration of the centenary of James Joyce’s Ulysses, curator Nuala O’Connor celebrated the Joyce’smutual devotion, alongside some of the music that bound them, while their world was in flux.
This exhibition was a multi-medium experience featuring two short films displayed parallel to the exhibition walls, creating a surrounding experience that functioned as a continuous loop.
Nuala O’Connor was born in Dublin in 1970 and lives in County Galway. Her fifth novel NORA (Harper Perennial/New Island, 2021), about Nora Barnacle, wife and muse to James Joyce, was named as a Top Ten historical novel by the New York Times in 2021. Nuala is editor at flash fiction e-journal Splonk.
