Robert Hartpole Goes Home, 2025
8-channel video work across 12 screens, duration 19 minutes
Single-channel video, duration 23 minutes
"Robert Hartpole Goes Home is a newly-commissioned artwork by Robles and Higgins, sited both at VISUAL and CarlowCounty Museum beside the effigy of sixteenth-century soldier Robert Hartpole. Dubbed ‘The maintainer of rebels’, Hartpole was an English sheriff of Laois and Carlow, infamous for orchestrating the massacre of Irish chieftains and their families during supposed peace negotiations at Mullaghmast, Kildare in 1578. According to legend, a dying priest there laid a curse upon him and his descendants. His tomb effigy, rediscovered in marshland in Carlow in 1809, was decapitated in an act of posthumous rejection. The head was never recovered, and the effigy moved out of town for over two hundred years before its recent return to the county museum.Robles and Higgins’ multi-channel videos re-imagine there turn of Hartpole to the present. Embodied onscreen by medieval enactment actor and tour guide Dylan Nolan,he drifts through a transformed landscape, searching for meaning in a country that no longer welcomes him, taunted by a jester played by the renowned Clown Johnie K. Haunted by legacy and dislocation, this representation finds only absence, a lineage erased, his head perhaps lost forever at the bottom of the Barrow river. Robert Hartpole Goes Home is additionally realised thanks to Eoin McDonnell, Leonard Fennell, Carlow Rowing Club,The Fennell Family, Cillian Roche & Gowle Farm and Deegan Fresh Produce, Kilkenny."
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