Museum

Renowned poet, Paula Meehan and award-winning photographer, Dragana Jurišić have joined forces to create a book celebrating the history of, and the lives lived in, 14 Henrietta Street. Museum tells the story of the building’s shifting fortunes through 300 years of city life: a journey from its grand Georgian beginnings to the tenement dwellings of its later years. Through people and memory, it aims to deepen understanding of the history of urban life and housing in Ireland.

"The DNA footprint of the people who lived in the house is impressed into the floors, stored beneath the floorboards, carved onto those walls. It’s the walls that fascinated me the most. They were like secret maps inviting you to imagine the hundreds of destinies 14 Henrietta Street witnessed. And that light! Some days I just sat there, never taking my camera out of the bag, looking over the flats of Dublin’s inner city, communing with it as it flooded the house from the rear windows. Sometimes the ghosts of children made me play with worn-out marbles; sometimes we brought out the dolls and toy guns and sat on the linoleum floor and I tried to conjure myself as having been born here, in the country that adopted me and is my home. Dublin, the city I always look forward to returning to, plunged yet again into a housing crisis that is pushing its artists out, the prohibitive rents making it near impossible to survive, and this house speaking of a similar past." -  Dragana Jurisic