Object Lessons
Start Date 13 Dec 2011
End Date 11 Mar 2012
Times
An exhibition at the Pearse Museum, St. Enda’s Park, Rathfarnham
13 December 2011 to 11 March 2012
Minster Brian Hayes TD launched “Object Lessons”, a temporary exhibition at the Pearse Museum on Tuesday 13 December. The exhibition consists of sixteen objects from the collections of Derrynane House, the Pearse Museum and Kilmainham Gaol. At first glance most of them look very ordinary, but it is the stories behind them which make them unique and priceless.
Among the objects on display are the last cups the Pearse Brothers drank from before leaving home to fight in the 1916 Rising, never to return. There is also a box of chocolates which Thomas Whelan gave to a young girl, Alicia Mann, prior to his execution in 1921. She never opened them in memory of him. The significance of a Pair of Gloves owned by Daniel O’Connell comes from the story that he wore a glove when receiving communion as an act of public penitence for killing a man in a duel in 1815.
The exhibition also looks at how objects can challenge our perception of the past and includes a British Military Medal bearing the head of Queen Victoria which was presented to Michael Mallin, one of the executed leaders of the 1916 Rising, when he fought with the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Punjab Frontier in the 1890s. The exhibition also looks at those people who had nothing to leave behind. Thousands of poor people ended up as prisoners in gaols around Ireland as a result of the Famine. A food docket from Kilaminaham Gaol records the number of prisoners to be fed on the 20th and 21st October, 1849, but hardly anything is known about these people and their stories.
The sixteen objects in this exhibition are mementoes, a word that comes from the Latin for remembering. They were kept as a way of holding on to memory, a moment in time. Today we preserve them in museums as a physical link with the past, a concrete connection with those who have gone before us.
