‘And This Is Where My Anxiety Manifested Itself…’: Gothic Suburbia in Contemporary Irish Art

The personal obsession with home-ownership became something of a national nightmare after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy as the aftermath of the crash saw the landscape blighted by unfinished and vacant housing estates that have become known as ‘ghost estates’. This chapter interprets the powerful nexus of Gothic aesthetics and the image of the ghost estate/vacant home in recent Irish art practice. Discussing several modes of visual art in the work of a number of contemporary artists, this chapter demonstrates the remarkable prevalence and malleability of the ghost estate as signifier of Irish economic collapse along with the enduring cultural attachment of Irish people to ‘home’.