More Irish: 'And They Became More Irish Than the Irish Themselves'
Elayne Adamczyk Harrington, 2025
A multimedia project exploring the performance, perception, and persistence of Irishness—through fashion, photography, music, video, corporeal action, voice, research, and lived experience.
This body of work draws from both public archives and personal materials—older lyrics, performances, fragments of faith, memory, and place. Some of these are re-enacted, reinterpreted, or responded to anew—in light of the Ireland I live in now, and the perspective I hold today as a woman, a Christian, a teacher, and a public servant.
It explores the uneasy space between caricature and reality: Paddy Irishman, the gargle, Guinness culture, the thick Dublin accent, the holy picture, the hangover. It reflects on the persistent weight of drink, class, and identity—how some things are dressed up as heritage, while others stay buried in shame or spectacle.
The work questions a surface-level hunger for nostalgie de la boue—that romantic pull toward the grit and charm of ‘real Irishness’—while asking: do we really embrace the complexity of working-class Dublin life, or just costume it?
This isn’t a gesture of blame, nor an act of rejection. It’s an open-ended inquiry—layered, self-reflexive, and unresolved. An embodied reflection unfolding across voice, image, action, and form.
Like Hot Butter On Our Breakfast Toast, May 2025.
Elayne Adamczyk Harrington, May 2025
Artwork title: Like Hot Butter on Our Breakfast Toast
Medium: Cotton hoodie with digitally reworked Irish Pride logo, screenprint on front.
Description: This wearable artwork reimagines the familiar Irish Pride bread logo into Big Boast—a rebranded emblem of cultural commentary. Screenprinted onto a yellow hoodie, the work operates as both a garment and conceptual vessel. It fuses fashion, nostalgia, and critique, echoing the swagger of hip hop’s golden era while examining the commodification of Irishness. Like Hot Butter On Our Breakfast Toast borrows its title from The Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight, foregrounding a transatlantic dialogue between hip hop lyricism and Irish working-class identity. The yellow hoodie is not just an aesthetic choice, but a chromatic link to the artist’s ongoing musical canon and an emblem of youth, resistance, and performative identity. In reclaiming this garment—once stigmatised in public discourse—the piece aligns street culture with national branding, drawing a line between the hood and the harp, the borough and the bread bin. Positioned between the gallery and the ghetto, the piece interrogates appropriation, pride, and poetic self-expression, while asking: What does it mean to wear your culture—not as costume, but as critique?
Archival Material and Research for The 'More Irish' Artwork
Learning the Irish ballad James Connolly on guitar
28th January 2010