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I WAS HERE
2026



On the occasion of

DUBLIN GIRLS
Freyja McDonald
24th June 2026
London Irish Centre 
50-52 Camden Square, NW1 9XB
A set of angel wings rests against a pair of curtains, pointed towards a window, ready to take flight. A bag of makeup lies spilt on the floor. I can’t see her, but someone was here.


Freyja McDonald is aware her work sits within a lineage of similar portfolios - Eimear Lynch’s Girls’ Night being the most recent addition to the canon - but it is not intended to feel compendial. Her research recognises that it would be an impossible task. Though, like many before her, she could’ve chosen to omit locations in a bid to create something ‘universal’, through no limitation, the work is explicitly set in Dublin, where the artist was raised. This is her girlhood in her version of home.  As such, there is a girl addressed in this love letter who possesses no body at all, and still poses for her portrait in the background of most images. Having settled in London, the artist personifies Dublin in a bid to rebuild her relationship with it, as with a friend left behind.  Moving through the pictures, this assertion invites us to rest on otherwise unassuming details; the Poolbeg Chimneys, for instance (a symbol of home to the artist), are sisters posing for a portrait, peeking through the clouds and standing out of reach, beyond a stormy sea. Similarly, a pair of friends is pictured out of focus, their gaze piercing through the blur, nonetheless.  


Key to this project is the word ‘Girl’ - loathed by some and embraced by others. The Girl, as a pejorative, denotes the woman not yet fully formed. A creature invalid and diminutive. On the other hand, it’s in this transit that the power of the Girl lies. With regards to her seminal project, Girl Pictures, Justine Kurland describes this as a ‘potential becoming’ (Another Magazine, 2018).


Notably, the Dublin Girls are either confronting the camera’s gaze or actively evading it, but never in between. Their will to absent from the frame is not to be seen as a lack or some sort of predictable shame. In these instances, the girls turn away from the camera. They move quicker than the shutter, leaving behind a haunting blur. Comfortably, they allow shadows to rest on their faces, casting anonymity. 

In this moment, I could be anywhere. I could be anyone. 

Indeed, the Girls make a ritual out of ‘becoming’; in a segment tracing the preparation for a teenage disco, McDonald documents acts of performance and the emotional weight of presentation during a time when it still felt celebratory as opposed to punishing. 


Where Kurland depicted the ‘girl nomad’ literally, the Dublin Girls (though documented in the same city) appear to wander nonetheless - out of sight and out of grasp. They are never still.

I was here once, now I’m elsewhere and further still from where I was before. And though uncertain in my steps, I’m moving faster than your grasp. You can’t catch me.  

Because that’s the blight of womanhood (or much of it anyway), isn’t it? The stillness of it. 

I’ve been caught - caught up in something or other, no time to spare, or simply captured and held down.

This stillness -perhaps born out of uncertainty or later on, fatigue - gives way to complicity and a helplessness decidedly unknown to the Girls of Dublin who, among shots of them disappearing, occasionally grab you to look directly into your eyes. Slow down.

I’m here now, and I may not be here for much longer - so stay.

At points, the images close that rift between woman and girl, middle and end, depicting the Girl as both ephemeral and enduring.  “Like Sunday and Monday”, McDonald writes in her journal, in reference to her younger sister and grandmother. Seemingly opposite embodiments of the Girl, walk side by side.

The haze of it all is fleeting, yes, and feels too precious to hold; like rays of gold slinking across the girls’ frames, illuminating their rooms and slipping through tufts of hair, or bursts of laughter and conversation interspersed on the audial companion to a ticking slide projection. 

But elsewhere, the Girl lives forever, and her origin can’t be traced. In the portrait titled The Santry Sisters, four girls stare directly into the camera, in much the same way as in the rest of the portfolio. The youngest of the four is held up to level with the rest, looking no less confrontational, displaying a level of awareness beyond her years. Nestled amongst her sisters’, her gaze reveals that Girlhood here - the hope, the boredom, the rage - is not learnt, or staged. It transcends the limits of age. It is eternal. 

I was here. I’ve always been here.