Fragments: Memories of Place

Fragments: Memories of Place, a site-specific sound sculpture, that brings together spoken memories from across three generations of Ballyogan residents. The work holds stories from those who remember the area as countryside in the 1940s, those who settled in the newly built estates of the 1980s and 1990s and helped establish vital community services, and those who have grown up in the locality more recently. Together, these voices reflect on remembering, making, and inheriting a place that has undergone profound transformation.

The sculpture is an abstraction of the five Ballyogan estates. Built from memory foam wrapped around a concrete foundation, it is hard infrastructure beneath a soft, malleable surface. The memory foam is fitted with transducers, devices that turn a solid object into a speaker. Consisting of 61 fragments activated by running your finger along the Ballyogan Road which is stitched with conductive thread.

Its composition style is inspired by Samuel Beckett's Company (1979), which recalls a walk along Ballyogan Road toward Three Rock Mountain, a landscape now buried beneath the roads and estates that followed.

The memories of place experienced as fragments within the piece were kindly shared by local residents and active community members; Maureen Tracey, Sandra Neville, Colette Farrington, Joanne Ewansiha, Joan Bell, Shaun Tracey, Valerie Kealy, Patrick Mooney, Joe Murphy, & Michael O' Halloran.

Through recorded conversations, these memories paint a picture of Ballyogan throughout the years. The fragments are interlaced with present-day field recordings connecting past and present Ballyogan.

With thanks also to Ballyogan Active Retirement Group, Ballyogan Family Resource Centre, Leopardstown Care Centre, Ballyogan Library. This is a public art project supported by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council Arts Office through the Per Cent for Art Scheme

The sculpture was installed in the Ballyogan Library, Samuel Beckett Centre from May to September 2026. The audio in the sculpture was powered by a Bela board connected to Fenoic speakers and amplifier. Audio files were triggered by a Bela Trill Craft connected to the conductive thread stitched into the Ballyogan Road on the memory foam. Through this custom system we also built reporting which captured 1,579 distinct touches of the conductive thread.

Allowing for the fact that one visit may be a single person returning to the thread repeatedly or several people sharing a moment, the work was likely experienced by somewhere in the region of 294–440 distinct people. 62 visits were sustained at five minutes or longer, with at least three oral histories heard to the end. A further 67 visits took in two or more recordings without clearing that strict bar, so 129 of 367 visits heard more than a single voice. The longest interaction ran to just over an hour. One visitor heard twelve different people in a single sitting.

As part of the legacy of the project we will be publishing more details on the data captured throughout the installation period including our process working with memory foam, conductive thread and our custom audio system.