Currently showing at Dublin's Project Arts Centre, mixed media artist Ciaran O Dochataigh's Vague Symptom Clinic considers Ireland's legacies of colonialism, partition, and state violence, and their relationship to intergenerational trauma and inherited chronic illness.
The exhibition’s title is taken from the real-life National Health Service (NHS) clinic that attempts to identify the origins or causes of a range of indefinite indicators of disease, including weight loss, fatigue, brain fog and night sweats.
Below, Ciaran reflects on illness, care, and hacks & modifications for the disabled and exhausted body, through the figure of his grandmother, Celine.
Granny Celine was there when it all started. We recently discovered a press photograph of her standing amongst the crowd during a Duke St. protest October the 5th 1968. My mother said she came home soaking from the water cannon that was deployed by the British state.
One of the references in the exhibition reads CN CS CT as part of a graphic colour wheel drawing that draws on the mucus colour charts the NHS provide to help patients measure the progress of their illness. CN and CS specifically reference the gas used by the British state against the Bogsiders for years in Derry where she lived all her life and in the prisons of the northern state. The gas would hang, literally lingering above the ground, in the Bog for a prolonged period. I have recently received several CT scans courtesy of the NHS which I'm grateful for, as part of their Vague Symptom Clinic's investigations into my progressive illness. There is an argument to suggest that prolonged exposure to CN and CS gas has added to respiratory problems in this part of Derry. Is sickness generational?
Celine died a horrific death of respiratory disease in Altnagelvin hospital, and witnessing that stayed with me for my whole life. She was cared for by the NHS like I am now. I think about our proximity to the border and wonder, what will an all-Ireland health service look like?
One of the other wedges on this graphic drawing reads Tesa Taped windows. One of my core memories growing up was the taped windows, doors and key holes of the veranda in Celine's place in Glenfada park. They were sealed and never opened; it was strictly out of bounds. I often wondered why, but I kind of knew.
There are several references in the exhibition to the Rossville Flats, firstly as you enter, a large graphic drawing of the facade of the flats.Completed in 1966, the Rossville Flats were iconic landmarks, like Belfast's Divis Flats, and came to represent the political history of Derry and the north of Ireland. In the years prior to demolition, the Housing Executive decided to make the flats more palatable by rendering sections of the facade in Mondriaan inspired colour blocks. In the exhibition these primary colours are swapped for mucus discharge colour registers or identifiers from low infection to high infection rates.
The other main reference to Rossville flats is the 'Granny hack' piece that depicts Celine using her internal lift from first floor to ground floor in her maisonette, continuing her journey down the ramp across the road and into the Rossville Flats. If the lifts worked (often, they didn't)she would choose the third floor, then walk across the gallery and pop out with her wheelie trolley at the top of Fahan St.
This was an ingenious way of using this imposed brutalist architecture of the state to your own advantage. Not only was the elevation of Rossville Flats used as an advantage by the Bogsiders, from the battle of the Bogside in 1969 and right through to the 1980s until its demolition, locals like Celine used the flats to ease their everyday trips.
The Granny hack wasn’t necessarily a short cut as it would take longer as she would be chatting all along the third-floor gallery. It was more a way to use this architecture to her advantage as her respiratory illness wouldn’t allow her to climb the gruelling adjacent steps at Joseph's Place and up the rest of Fahan Street.
Celine had chronic illnesses all her life, including extreme debilitating eczema – as a younger woman at one point being bandaged from head-to-toe – and chronic asthma that caused her health to deteriorate throughout her life. But these illnesses never defined her and didn’t stop her from getting out there whenever she could and having a good time. She literally was the life of the party. They would all go on a mystery tour bus run; she would go to bingo and the Thursday club. One of the lasting memories we have of her is that she and her friends would get the Knock pilgrimage bus and tell the bus driver to drop them off en route at Bundoran, where they would spend all day playing the slot machines – the one-armed bandits – and then get picked up by the holy and blessed on the way home. Another Granny hack.
Ciaran O Dochataigh's Vague Symptom Clinic is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin until 17th January 2026 - find out more here
