Susannah Williams Photography|Photographer | Ireland

Dúchas explores living Irish seasonal traditions through portraiture, still life, and landscape, examining how ritual, craft, and community create belonging in contemporary Ireland.

The work spans three festivals from Ireland’s ancient Celtic calendar: Imbolc, Bealtaine, and the Wren/Mummer tradition. At Uisneach, where Bealtaine fires have burned for thousands of years, these photographs were made at the edges of the gathering: figures in golden light, a woman crowned with antlers at dusk, the sacred hawthorn in full white bloom, community gathered around living flame. The Mummers, a tradition carried through communities throughout the year, appearing at weddings, doorsteps, and festivals in handmade costumes of rags, ribbons, and locally grown straw, are photographed not in spectacle but in the quieter human moments: a face lifted by music, the delight of unexpected company.

Still life photography sits alongside the portraits as an equal and deliberate strand of the work. The objects depicted, straw Mummer hats, Brigid’s crosses, Brideog dolls, are photographed as both craft and document: a record of living tradition at this moment in time. The straw is grown by a local farmer specifically for his community. The rushes for the Brigid’s work grow naturally along local riverbanks, as they always have. These are not museum objects. They are made by hand, from living materials, by people who choose to carry something forward.

The exhibition was anchored by an enormous vinyl portrait of a female Mummer, mounted directly to the wall. Her handmade costume is layered, textural, and completely transformative: part disguise, part celebration, entirely herself. Alongside this, smaller prints from the Bealtaine fire festival at Uisneach run in sequence: moments of movement, celebration, and collective energy captured in intimate scale. The still lives are given the largest printed presence of all the photographs, A2 and A3 prints of straw Mummer hats, Brigid’s crosses, and Brideog dolls held in careful stillness. The contrast is deliberate: a hive of activity alongside quiet objects, the human moment and the artifact given equal but different weight. Together they create a rhythm between human presence, living tradition, and the things people make to carry it forward. At its heart, Dúchas asks who carries culture forward, and what it feels like to belong to something larger than yourself.

Bealtaine marks the beginning of summer in the old Celtic calendar. At the Hill of Uisneach, where Bealtaine fires have burned for thousands of years, people gathered to welcome the season with procession, horses, music and flame.

These photographs were made at the edges of the gathering, among the people who come back year after year and carry the festival forward. They sit alongside Dúchas, my exhibition on living Irish seasonal traditions and what it feels like to belong to something larger than yourself.

A morning with Core & Coast Pilates at The Yoga Barre Studio in Kilcoole: a Pilates class in the low autumn sun, brunch from Holisugar Cakery, and a sound bath with Yoga with Parag to close. I photographed it from start to finish, from the quiet studio before anyone arrived to the last notes of the bowls.

An evening outdoors under the trees for the launch of Rachael Ball's book, Ayna: The Poetry Oracle. There were readings, some gentle movement, time to reflect on memory, and cake as the light turned gold. It was a warm and close gathering, and I was glad to be the one photographing it.